NOAH PORTER’S PROBLEM AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

GRAHAM RICHARDS

The twin problems facing nineteenth-century American “mental and moral philosophy” ofthe nature of psychological language and the constraints that religious beliefs placed onpossibilities of innovation in a “scientific Psychology” are both highly visible in the workof Noah Porter, who was unable to resolve them. They are also more covertly identifiablein the works of James McCosh and others in this school. It is suggested that the transitionto the “New Psychology” of the 1880s and 1890s needs to be rethought in light of this inthree respects: (a) ironically, it entailed repressing insights into the psychological languageproblem, (b) the legacy of the religious factor profoundly affected U.S. Psychology andplayed a less unambiguously negative role in its fortunes than customarily portrayed, and(c) the transition was itself a more complex and protracted process than is portrayed in tra-ditional “revolutionary” accounts. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

. . . as an expression of psychological facts and a touchstone of psychological theories,the language of common life is far more worthy to be trusted than the language of theschools. It is the outspeaking of those beliefs and feelings, of which man is naturally con-scious and which he therefore spontaneously expresses. It is the unconstrained embodi-ment of all the experiences of his inner self; the subtle robe which the spirit is continu-ally weaving for its inner purposes. (Porter, 1871/1887, p. 85)

If anyone could legitimately claim to know about words it was Noah Porter (1811–1892),long-time editor of Webster’s Dictionary, Yale’s Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy andMetaphysics from 1846, and then, from 1871, its president. We are told he was a bad admin-istrator, notoriously reactionary, and conservative,1 but let us leave that aside. If anyone inmid-nineteenth century American academia knew about contemporary Psychology,2 it wasPorter, whose 700-page textbook The Human Intellect (1868/1872), with its citations of G.Fechner, H. Lotze, E. H. Weber, J. Braid, and other European luminaries, dominated a fieldhighly contested by rival “mental and moral” philosophers, and also, for the most part, col-lege presidents. And if “linear thinking” is a besetting sin of the modern white Western malepsyche, we must at least allow that Noah Porter pushed it to the limit, The Human Intellectbeing set in three different size fonts—large for the main text, middle for supplementary ex-

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 40(4), 353–374 Fall 2004Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20043© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

GRAHAM RICHARDS is a professor of history of psychology at Staffordshire University and directorof the British Psychological Society’s History of Psychology Centre in London. Among his works are OnPsychological Language (1989), Mental Machinery Part One. 1600–1850 (1992), ‘Race,’ Racism andPsychology: Towards a Reflexive History (1997), and Putting Psychology in Its Place: A CriticalHistorical Overview (2002, 2nd ed.). He was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of London in 1998 andoriginally graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

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1. See Starr (1935), from which much of the ensuing information was also drawn. Anyone doubting as to how heavy-weight a figure Porter could be should look at the 1871 translation (by G. S. Morris) of Friedrich Ueberweg’s two-volume History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, to which Porter supplied extensive recondite anno-tations and an appendix on “Philosophy in Great Britain and America” (Vol. 2, pp. 350–460). The latter is a quitemasterly bibliographic tour de force.

2. In this article, I follow my usual custom of capitalizing Psychology/Psychological when referring to the discipline,reserving the lowercase to refer to its subject matter. This differentiation is necessary in order to avoid convolutedcircumlocutions and to render more simple the discussion of the relationship between the two. I have justified thisat length in numerous previous publications (e.g., G. Richards, 1992a, p. 407, n. 1).

pansion, and small for the detailed scholarly minutia. It was extravagantly eulogized by oneauthority as “incomparably superior to any treatise on psychology in English existing at thetime when it appeared” (G. M. Duncan, quoted by Starr, 1935, who provides no details of thesource). Only his exact contemporary, the president of Princeton (then still the College ofNew Jersey), Scottish émigré James McCosh (1811–1894), matched Porter’s authority in thefield, and he had not published a comparable work.

In searching for the mid-nineteenth century understanding of the nature of psychologicallanguage, that issue which so elusively, yet—as I have argued elsewhere—so crucially, under-pins the emergence of the discipline itself, there is thus no candidate better suited for our atten-tion (G. Richards, 1989, 1992a, b). It was, after all, from the matrix of the “mental and moralphilosophy” tradition in the United States that modern Psychology emerged, regardless of a his-toriographic disregard, only recently abating, entailed by the heroicist stress on the “NewPsychology” “revolution” of the 1880s and 1890s.3 A revolution there perhaps was, but Porter’sand McCosh’s respective protégés George Trumball Ladd and James Mark Baldwin were in thethick of it, with their patrons’ full backing (G. Richards, 1995), both lineages ignored by E. G.Boring (1948/1963). A second issue, which we will see is interwoven with the linguistic one,concerns the role of religious belief. As European religious, theological, and philosophicalthought underwent continuous transformation from the later Enlightenment onward, Americanpost-revolutionary culture retained a basically Protestant, quasi-Puritan character well into thenineteenth century.4 Popular pious texts promoting spiritual self-examination, such as IsaacWatts’s The Improvement of the Mind (1782) and John Mason’s A Treatise on Self-Knowledge(first published in 1745), enjoyed regular reprintings in the United States long after their Britishmarket had disappeared.5 American mental and moral philosophers were almost all piousProtestants of some hue or other, many ordained ministers, and the Congregationalist NoahPorter was typical in this respect. This doctrinal commitment has traditionally been viewed asthe school’s most negative feature, and perhaps the major barrier the New Psychology had toovercome. This interpretation also demands some reappraisal.

What follows is, at heart, an examination of how the origin of Psychology looks if weswitch from the now conventional starting point of the Wundt, Fechner, Galton, “and all that”and begin instead with Porter’s quite elaborated views on psychological language as ex-pounded in The Human Intellect (1868/1872) and his later The Sciences of Nature versus theScience of Man (1871), in which a more polemical battle is joined with the evolutionists.Making such a switch may, perhaps ironically, be viewed as a European historiographic movein that while North American disciplinary historians traditionally stressed Psychology’sEuropean roots to enhance the discipline’s genealogical respectability, from the current

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3. See G. Richards (1995); Davis (1936) typifies this position.

4. See Evans (1984) for the roots of academic “mental and moral philosophy” in this context.

5. As an albeit crude indication of this, regarding Mason’s Self-Knowledge, a June 26, 2002, search onabebooks.com, the major second-hand bookselling Web site, listed 50 copies available, 47 providing places of pub-lication, and 45 places plus dates. Seventeen were published in Britain, with dates spanning 1745 (the 1st ed.) to1826 (a provincial edition from Exeter), three being nineteenth-century editions; by contrast, 30 appeared in theUnited States or Canada, spanning 1801 to 1856 (Halifax, Nova Scotia), the last U.S. edition listed being in 1851 inHartford, Connecticut (two were undated). U.S. publication sites were wide-ranging, including Lexington,Wilmington, Detroit, Hartford, Boston, Montpelier, Baltimore, Charleston (Massachusetts), and New York. This Website is undoubtedly somewhat skewed toward North American editions, but this hardly accounts for the disappear-ance of British editions after the mid-1820s. One value of this as a data source is that the frequency of appearanceof specific editions provides a better indication of actual numbers of copies sold than simple national catalog entriesfor number of editions published. This goes some way to redressing the absence of actual print-run and sales data.See also Rieber (1998) on this point.

European perspective it is modern Psychology’s essentially American character that is morestriking. In defense of the earlier historians, it must be said that this distinctly American char-acter has only really become apparent over the last three decades or so.

NOAH PORTER ON THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LANGUAGE

Porter first defined his concept of Psychology as a science thus: “Psychology is a sci-ence. It professes to exhibit what is actually known or may be learned concerning the soul, inthe forms of science—i.e., in the forms of exact observation, precise definition, fixed termi-nology, classified arrangement, and rational explanation” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 5). He also,quite insightfully, spelled out the logically foundational position of Psychology. The criteriaof good scientific method and the rules of logic, of “the laws of right thinking,” are ultimatelydependent on a Psychological understanding of thinking, even though the enquiries by whichthis understanding is gained are subject to these very laws and rules:

By studying the mind, we discover the laws by which both mind and matter can be stud-ied aright. . . . It is, then, through psychology that we reach the very sciences to whichpsychology itself is subject and amenable. Psychology is the starting point from whichwe proceed. Psychology is also the goal to which we must return, if we retrace the pathalong which science has led us. In synthesis we begin, in analysis we end, with thismother of all the sciences. (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 15)

The introduction is then closed by two crucial pages on language, his position being cap-tured in the following passage:

The most superficial inspection of the words which describe the thoughts and feelings,reveals the fact conclusively that they were all originally appropriated to material objectsand to physical phenomena. The words perceive, understand, imagine, disgust, disturb,adhere, and a multitude besides, were all originally applied to some material act or event.It is only by a secondary or transferred signification that they stand for the states or actsof the soul. (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 27)

Having quoted Locke’s famous passage6 and the German K. F. Becker in support of this, hethen counseled us to be on the alert against being misled by “physical analogons,” which can“suggest erroneous and mischievous conclusions” before devoting a passage (in smaller font)to a more extended lamentation, ending:

Hence it becomes so important that the conceptions which we form should be sharplydistinguished from the language in which they are uttered; and that the student of psy-chology should place himself ever on his guard against the influence of the images andassociations which are continually put into his mouth by the language which the neces-sities of his being force him to use; which language, however high it may soar into thespiritual, can never free itself from the matter in which all terms have their origin.(Porter, 1868/1872, p. 29)

Nor did he leave the matter here. Returning to the issue later, he observed:

By the sharply-cut outlines of language, thought-objects are so presented that we canavoid a crowded, feeble, or bewildered gaze, when we would summon our energies tocompare, classify, and explain. But language does not create phenomena and furnish ob-

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6. Essay on Human Understanding B. iii., chap. 1., § 5 (Locke, 1690/1894), given in full in G. Richards (1992a, pp.106–107).

servations. It simply records both, and directs and stimulates others to repeat like effortsof thought for themselves. (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 112, italics mine)

He then praised the “common discourse of men . . . the subtle robe which the spirit is con-stantly weaving for itself in all its inner processes” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 113)7 as a necessarycorrective to the biases “refined and technical terminology” may engender.

In The Sciences of Nature versus the Science of Man (1871), Porter viewed the new“cerebralist” theories of James and John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, and the evolutionists(especially Herbert Spencer) as having fallen into just the kind of false “physical analogons”he had earlier warned against. “Nothing is more arrogant, and nothing ought to be more of-fensive, than that the powers and principles on which all science and induction depends,should be resolved by and after analogies derived from the mechanics of matter and the dy-namics of life. To narrowness of this sort the sciences of nature offer special temptations” (pp.82–83). The very foundational role of Psychology that renders it so special was, then, at riskof being obscured and subverted.

Porter’s attitude to psychological language was thus peculiarly ambivalent—on the onehand, he was highly alert to the constraints, distortions, and limitations it may impose uponour Psychological understanding (an awareness that informed his critique of “cerebralism”);on the other, he wished to separate it from all other psychological phenomena—”it simplyrecords.” In fact, despite its having those psychological effects he was so eager to warn usagainst, language seems to be hardly a psychological phenomenon at all. And psychologistsmust, it seems, always submit their technically couched accounts to the tribunal of “commondiscourse.” He would, I believe, be right in some sense on this last point were it not that forhim this tribunal, this “folk psychology” as it is now somewhat patronizingly termed, willnonetheless somehow remain psychologically unaffected by any linguistic innovationsPsychology might propose—serving only to discriminate between the well and the badly re-ported in the light of existing folk psychological language and understanding. Such an inter-pretation of the situation clearly also reinforced Porter’s conservative religious position.

These ruminations on language need to be understood in the context of Porter’s broaderaccount. In the first place, Psychology was to be distinguished from both physiology and an-thropology—which treats “man” as “a complex whole, as he is varied in temperament, race,sex and age. . .” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 7)—in that “the phenomena with which it has to do areapprehended by consciousness” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 7). Porter is here perhaps followingSamuel Bailey (1858, pp. 259–260) in whose classification of “Anthropology, or Inquiriesconcerning Man” Psychology is reserved for “mental operations” and “individual and per-sonal character,” the connections between the physical body and consciousness being theprovince of phrenology and physiognomy and their more physiologically sophisticated suc-cessors. Porter was, at any rate, familiar with Bailey, citing him elsewhere in a different con-nection. “[R]eal knowledge of the soul” may be gained only “by turning the gaze inward”(Porter, 1868/1872, p. 9). While Porter did not expressly have in mind here any Wundtian ex-perimental introspection, but rather “the habit of self-knowledge,” the gulf between the twofinally emerges as not that wide. This gave “psychological studies” an intrinsically moral di-mension as fostering self-knowledge and teaching us to understand others. “If, also, we wouldknow our fellow men to do them good, we must first know ourselves. This suggests the im-portant service psychology may render to teachers of every class; from she who communi-

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7. The present article’s epigraph is taken from Elements of Intellectual Science, the 1871 abridgement of The HumanIntellect (p. 85), in which the wording of the original is slightly improved stylistically.

cates to the infant the first elements of its ‘mother tongue’ to he who toils with his fit thoughscanty audience along the loftiest heights of philosophical thinking” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 10).

Psychology also trains us to understand and enjoy literature and may release our creativepowers, nor “ought” we “to omit the peculiar grace and charm which is lent to the characterthrough the influence of that moral reflection which is the natural result of self-acquaintance”(Porter, 1868/1872, p. 10).

For Porter, Psychology as a science of consciousness based on “self knowledge” thusgathered all the proverbial merits of “self knowledge” unto itself, maintaining the spirit ofWatts and Mason. It provides us not only with a “scientific” understanding of the arrangementof the mind’s faculties and powers, or the nature of thought, memory, and perception, but alsosustains, by virtue of its methodology, a project of Socratic moral education. He was, in thisrespect, not only seeing Psychology as serving an academic educational function, but reflect-ing the deep-rooted cultural preoccupation with “self knowledge” inherited from the originalBritish Protestant tradition of constant spiritual self-scrutiny. But, in a somewhat disguisedform, such passages also evoked Thomas Brown’s paradox as identified in G. Richards(1992a), which it was there suggested remains as yet unresolved (Brown, 1820/1836). Forpresent purposes, this may be summarized as the conflict between assuming “the psycholog-ical” to be a fixed “natural phenomenon” (which enables us to study it “scientifically”) andjustifying the Psychology project in terms of the psychological changes it will bring about(which renders it useful).

Porter’s model of the mind was a fairly typical Scottish Realist one, conventionally iden-tifying an ascending hierarchy of “powers” from sensation up to “reason,” but he extendedthis further by differentiating between a universal “natural consciousness” and a higher “re-flective” or “philosophical consciousness” attainable by those who devote their energies withspecial dedication and discipline to the reflective exercise of natural consciousness (quite ex-plicitly deploying a crude energy-distribution model here, coming uncomfortably closer toHerbert Spencer than he would probably have imagined). This is attained by “comparativelyfew” (Porter, 1868/1872, p. 104). Exercising this form of consciousness in the service of sci-entific Psychological investigation moves us beyond the level of the individual ego to theSelf—the ego stripped of its individuality (see especially Porter, 1868/1872, pp. 110–111),which brought him into more Kantian territory. But explaining the implementation of this taskled him into spelling out the requirements of scientific introspection in terms not radicallydissimilar to the Wundtian ones detailed by E. B. Titchener (1898), for example. En route, weare alerted to the perils of “skepticism” as a morbid aberration of reflective consciousness,while religion is disclosed as underpinned by true scientific Psychological understanding—which shows it to be the natural outcome of a healthy intellectual development. This last wasa vitally important doctrine that some of the more devout New Psychologists like Ladd re-tained, but it set serious limits on what Porter’s kind of scientific Psychology could attain.

“Porter’s Problem,” as I wish to call it, thus has two aspects. The first is reconciling the“figurative” nature of psychological language with a concept of “human nature” as eternallyfixed. This he managed by denying that psychological language itself can have any effect on thatto which it refers. This denial is asserted rather than argued, and is, prima facie, unconvincingin that it entails denying that language is itself a psychological phenomenon, and is at odds withhis own claims that it can mislead us by “false analogons.” (Presumably then, “cerebralist”Psychological theories based on such “analogons” are not psychological phenomena either, de-spite scientific theories being among the highest of the mind’s products!) He was not the first tobe faced with this difficulty. Thomas C. Upham had never been able to fully integrate an accountof language into his wider Psychological system, reserving a separate section for it throughout

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all the numerous editions of his Elements of Mental Philosophy, the first major “Psychology”text by an American. R. W. Rieber has also observed that Upham was clearly uncertain aboutwhether language was a constituent of mind itself (Rieber, 1998, p. 198; see also Rieber, 1977).Arguably, only James Rush eventually succeeded in doing so.8 Second, Porter promoted theproject of a scientific Psychology while simultaneously striving to preempt the possibility thatit would ever discover anything doctrinally embarrassing. The latter committed him to a conceptof Psychology in which it could achieve little more than tweaking and rendering more rigorousthe received Scottish Realist Protestant view of human nature, perhaps by leavening it with themore doctrinally congenial insights of the German philosophers.

The Human Intellect, daunting as it is, was, along with the abridged version The Elementsof Intellectual Science (Porter, 1871/1887), one of the most influential mid-nineteenth centuryAmerican Psychological texts, and a fuller reappraisal of its contents than is offered here isbadly needed. In particular, the very extended discussion and defense of the need for “FinalCause” explanations in the latter part of the volume needs reexamining, as does the extent towhich Porter was moving away from, or seeking to expand, the orthodox Scottish realist posi-tion in a more Kantian direction. The preceding discussion should, however, be sufficient to in-dicate its significance for present purposes, namely that Noah Porter’s position in this work andThe Sciences of Nature versus the Science of Man contains the profound and deeply signifi-cant contradictions just sketched.

The nub of the problem lies of course in the fundamentally religious character of Porter’sthought, a feature he shared with the overwhelming majority of his American academic con-temporaries in the field, although none manifests the “Problem” with quite such transparencyas Porter—primarily because none was quite so sensitive to the linguistic issue. Traditional his-toriography of Psychology invariably cast this religious factor as a purely negative stultifyinginfluence, the stumbling block or barrier that the discipline’s famous American founders of the1880s and 1890s heroically overcame and abandoned (e.g., Boring, 1957; Schultz, 1975;Watson, 1963). This is too simplistic. The Human Intellect, like many rival, if less successful,later works in the mental and moral philosophy genre of the 1860s onward, was replete withcitations of contemporary European work. Porter actually viewed Fechnerian psychophysicsfavorably for confirming that the “mind” was a legitimate object of scientific study irreducibleto materialist physiology. It was the almost universal academic presence of usually presiden-tially taught and doctrinally orthodox mental and moral philosophy courses within theAmerican college system that supplied the basis for Psychology’s rapid emergence toward thecentury’s end, and provided proponents such as G. S. Hall, James Mark Baldwin, J. McKeenCattell, and John Dewey with a sound academic grounding in psychological issues prior totheir German postgraduate adventures. As far as the academic institutionalization ofPsychology is concerned, this was far from a hindrance, particularly compared to the Britishsituation, for it gave the Americans a head start over those such as Alexander Bain, James Sully,and James Ward, who spent a large proportion of their careers either excluded from academiaor, in Ward’s case, battling in vain against reactionary Anglican hostility to any approach tohuman nature that smacked of science. The price to be paid was a lesser degree of intellectualindependence, the British being by and large free from having to service any formal moral ed-ucation agenda and unaccountable to employing institutions for the positions they adopted.

This situation had another benefit in that it situated American Psychology in a culturallyadvantageous position from the outset, enabling its pioneers (generally either religious them-

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8. See Ostwald and Rieber (1980), Rush (1868).

selves or at least sympathetic to religion) to inherit from Porter and his peers their mantle ofquasi-official moral authority (G. Richards, 1995). By contrast, in Britain, Psychology’s pio-neers were far more marginalized, as well as being for the most part anti- or nonreligious. (Itis perhaps salutary to observe also that in 1891 Cardinal Mercier established a Psychologylaboratory at Louvain in Belgium before Sully was able to found the first British laboratoryat University College, London.)

But however mixed the blessings of mental and moral philosophy may now appear to be,emancipation from Porter’s “Problem” was still a necessary condition for the emergence ofmodern Psychology in North America during the 1880s and 1890s, and the question of howthis was achieved remains to be answered. In doing so, we will also have to rethink furtherthe nature of American Psychology’s relationship with religion.

JAMES MCCOSH

We may begin by reconsidering James McCosh, Porter’s major rival on the mental andmoral philosophy scene and James Mark Baldwin’s primary patron. He also taught the phys-iological psychologist Moses Allen Starr, who went on to study under Charcot and Helmholtz.Curti (1980) noted that Starr “recalled that in McCosh’s classes he was introduced to thenewest European work in physiological psychology and psychodynamics” (p. 197, n. 32; seealso Arner, 1967). First, we need to sketch, albeit briefly, McCosh’s intellectual trajectory. Inhis pre-American days, he had striven to rectify the deficiencies in the Reidian intuitionist“common sense” philosophy with which he was most in sympathy, a task he undertook withsome success in Intuitions of the Mind (1860), while Typical Forms and Special Ends inCreation (1856), co-authored with G. Dickie, was also significant in adumbrating his laterconcern with evolutionary issues. His main target, however, was associationism, which he sawas both philosophically unsound and morally dangerous, viewing its “Sensationalist” doc-trines—as expounded by Frenchmen like Condorcet—as a major factor in precipitating theFrench Revolution. Though he held J. S. Mill in high esteem personally, he subjected his doc-trines to laborious, but in places surprisingly effective, dissection in An Examination of Mr.J.S. Mill’s Philosophy (1866), the title of course being a response to Mill’s An Examination ofSir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). But while his awe of Sir William clearly out-stripped his admiration for J. S. Mill, McCosh recoiled from the former’s idealist and agnos-tic tendencies almost as much as he did from the latter’s associationism and appended to thework a lengthy list of magazine articles in which he had criticized him. At this stage, McCoshmay be cast as the last homegrown representative of the “Common Sense” or “ScottishRealist” school, doggedly steering his way between profane materialist sensationalism andwoolly German metaphysics. Hoeveler (1981, p. ix) considers that “(h)e is clearly the lastmajor voice of the Scottish Enlightenment and the system of philosophical realism for whichit is best known.” (McCosh’s, The Scottish Philosophy of 1874, actually played a major rolein creating the current image of this as a distinctive philosophical school.) His attitude to hispredecessors in that school was not uncritical, and Hoeveler identifies his initial agenda asbeing to reconcile the overrefined and decorous orientation of the later ScottishEnlightenment thinkers (like James Beattie) with the cruder, but full-blooded, philistine evan-gelical “fire and brimstone” tradition. In this clash, McCosh sided emotionally with the lat-ter. While never abandoning his “realist,” intuitionist position (indeed he published hisRealistic Philosophy in 1882), nor his deep religious concerns (his propensity for visiting sickstudents for prayer sessions was legendary, Mrs. McCosh accompanying him with the applepie), the cast of his works gradually shifted following his emigration. In Robert J. Richards’s

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words, “McCosh’s thought evolved like an archaeopteryx. Its heavy reptilian skeleton of Scotsmetaphysical and epistemological realism prevented graceful flight into the newer areas ofpsychology and biology. But at least it did get off the ground” (R .J. Richards, 1987, p. 453).

The Emotions (1880) well illustrates what R. J. Richards has in mind here, although heobviously shares the dismissive attitude toward the Scottish school once commonplace amongtwentieth-century American intellectual historians and psychologists. Ostensibly an attemptat comprehensively synthesizing the various aspects of emotion in a scientific fashion, it re-peatedly digressed from this course before losing sight of it altogether. The early chapterseach begin with earnest analyses of the errors of McCosh’s predecessors and frequent invo-cations of the subtleties a scientific Psychological account of the emotions must address. Butbefore long we are into tendentious moral homilies, anecdotes, and warnings. The final sec-tion is a lengthy disquisition on aesthetics, far from the agenda presented at the outset. Thereare occasional flashes; at one point, for example, we seem about to be treated to a pre-Jamesian meditation on the stream of thought, but all too soon it dries up.9

McCosh’s pastoral concerns for the young men of Princeton and his intellectual interestin the “science of psychology” struggle for priority throughout—to the latter’s cost at least.And yet, lumbering though his introspective ponderings generally are, and routine as his ob-servations of emotional life might be, the actual technique he is using often differs fromJames’s more in quality than in kind. Thus, where James invoked fascinating cases such asProfessor Strumpell’s anesthetic shoemaker’s apprentice exhibiting grief at the loss of hissense of taste when presented with “a formerly favorite dish,”10 McCosh rested on a standardscenario, such as a mother receiving news of a son lost in battle. And while stressing the pri-macy of the mental and the limitations of physiological accounts of emotion, he dutifully in-corporated chunks of Charles Darwin and Charles Bell where appropriate, as well as tryingto provide a clear argument for ignoring the “transformationist” evolutionary perspective forhis present purposes. Nor did his Reidian approach prevent him from judiciously deployingassociationist arguments on occasion, even though he tended to give Bain short shrift. In sum,clear stresses were emerging here between the “mental” and “moral” sides of his “mental andmoral science” agenda.

In Psychology: The Cognitive Powers (1886), McCosh proclaimed Psychology to be the in-ductive “science of the soul.”11 Early on, he, like Porter, stressed, “We have to beware of the mis-leading influence of language derived from material objects. Our first language is sensible rather

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9. I refer to the five-page Chapter 2, Section IV, entitled “Spontaneous Flow of Thought.” He used both the streammetaphor and a cloud image: “Our floating ideas, not determined by outward circumstances or by some fixed pur-pose, move like clouds in the sky.” He then elaborated on this by equating mood to different kinds of cloud effect—light and fleecy, glowing and radiant, chill as mists, dark and scowling, dull and uninteresting. McCosh’s stream wasnot quite the Jamesian one; it referred instead to more or less prolonged inner-driven moods and preoccupations andwas conceptualized as “impelled unconsciously by deeply underlying appetences (i.e., emotions), natural and ac-quired, and flowing in the channels opened by the laws of association intellectual and emotive” (p. 72). It is one ofthe best passages in the book, notwithstanding its dour finale in “husbands have murdered their wives, to be rid ofthe memorials of domestic cruelty or of broken vows” (p. 76). Curti (1980, p. 210) also finds a hint of the James-Lange theory of emotion in this work (on pp. 102–103).

10. Principles of Psychology (1890, Vol. II, pp. 465–466). James, of course, also seeks to argue that the apprentice’sgrief was illusory, since his anesthesia prevented bodily events generating the psychological experience of emotionin the way in which the James-Lange theory proposed. This is, however, incidental to the point being made here.

11. This work and the companion volume Psychology: The Motive Powers (1887) were, according to Sloane, initi-ated by an appeal from a missionary in India for something to counteract “the materialism diligently taught by booksfrom England” and sanctioned by the University of Calcutta (Sloane, 1896, p. 210). The 1887 work actually turnsout to comprise a recycling of The Emotions, amounting to three-quarters of the text, plus two shorter chapters on“Conscience” and “The Will, or Optative Power.”

than spiritual” (pp. 8–9). If less discursive on the point than Porter, McCosh too was implicitlyin the same bind on the matter. McCosh classified the faculties simply into the Cognitive Powersand the Motive Powers, subdividing the former into the Simple or Presentative (perception andself-consciousness), the Reproductive or Representative, and the Comparative. Motive Powerscomprise Conscience (which is actually part Motive and part Cognitive), the Emotions (or“Appetences” as he prefers to call them), and the Will. By now, McCosh was well aware thatphysiological aspects could not be left aside, and was introducing physiological Psychology intohis teaching, including discussion of Wundt’s Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie,which had appeared in 1874.12 He was also taking note of other Psychological work, reportinga replication of Francis Galton’s “Questions Upon the Visualizing and Allied Faculties” (Galton,1883/1919) undertaken by himself and Professor Osborne on students at Princeton and Vassar(the leading women’s college). “The answers,” he noted, “are very curious.” According to hisfirst biographer, he could be found “busy at eighty incorporating some of the latest results ofGerman research in a new edition of his Psychology” (Sloane, 1896, p. 263). This reading in-cluded, for example, W. Preyer’s The Mind of the Child (which appeared in the United States in1888, 1889 in two volumes). He similarly remained engaged with evolutionary thought, con-tributing to the intellectual climate in which the strongly evolutionist Psychologies of G. S. Hall,Baldwin, and James could be elaborated, The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1888, with a re-vised and enlarged edition in 1890) being the text in which, pursuing R. J. Richards’s metaphor,he reached his greatest altitude. He was now happy to concede that “evolution is God’s way ofdoing things” and even rescued a version of the old Paleyite Argument from Design from thesituation. McCosh certainly moved closer to Psychology than Porter, but for all his ostensiveprogressiveness clearly remained largely stuck with Porter’s Problem. If not manifesting thedilemma so transparently, he too was hamstrung by the religious conviction that Psychology,however scientific, will not discover anything radically challenging to the orthodox Protestantimage of the human mind developed by the Scottish Realist tradition. Like Porter, he too wasunable to see or follow through the implications of the figurative nature of psychological lan-guage, which he acknowledged. And as with Porter, McCosh’s commitment to the centrality ofmoral and religious factors in determining the nature of academic philosophy, a commitmentrooted both in his Scottish Enlightenment background and common American university prac-tice, continued to govern the content and aims of what he wrote.

Yet there was movement afoot. While Porter’s positive efforts on behalf of the “NewPsychology” extended little further than appointing George Trumball Ladd (a fellow ordainedCongregationalist) to assume his teaching duties at Yale, McCosh became far more closely in-volved with contemporary developments in Psychology. He actively encouraged studentssuch as Baldwin to visit European centers of learning and when they returned enlisted themas allies in the internecine political battles of American academia. When Baldwin translatedT. Ribot’s German Psychology of Today (1886) into English, it was McCosh who wrote thepreface, and Wozniak (1998) has shown how Baldwin’s entire intellectual development cen-tered on McCosh’s influence. In the late 1880s, Baldwin’s own aim was less to overthrow themusty “Scottish School” than to reconcile and integrate its intuitional realism with experi-mental scientific methods. It would clearly be misleading to depict McCosh simply as a rep-resentative of a defunct school of “philosopher-psychologists”—if his approach became de-funct, it was not for want of a willingness on his part to engage the new approaches emanatingfrom Europe. Indeed he actively encouraged such imports. He worked hard to install Baldwin

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12. See Wozniak (1992) and Hoeveler (1981, pp. 288–289).

on the faculty at Princeton (first as a reluctant teacher of French and German, but, after someperegrinations, becoming Professor of Psychology in 1893). The demise of McCosh’s kind ofPsychology was not due to some inherent imperviousness to change, or blindness to the sci-entific light radiating from Leipzig and Down House. It was due rather to the outmoded na-ture of the philosophical system in which McCosh grounded his Psychology and perhaps afailure to identify clearly the boundary between the two. (But who in the 1880s did have aclear notion of the philosophy/Psychology boundary? Who does yet?) What is more crucialis that his intuitionist realism was increasingly incapable of competing in intellectual rigor (orindeed vigor) with the emerging pragmatisms of William James, Charles S. Peirce, and JohnDewey or the Idealism of James Royce.13 McCosh’s philosophy was not the only loser; the1880s saw the new Harvard-based academic philosophy beginning to oust the professionalcredibility of “Mental and Moral Science/Philosophy” in general as a viable philosophical po-sition (Kucklick, 1977), while, on a wider scale, new secular universities (such as Stanford,Johns Hopkins, and Clark) were undermining the dominance of the institutional religious in-terests from which it drew its strength. Moreover, there is evidence that during the 1870s and1880s senior American academics and educationists were becoming increasingly ambivalentabout the moral effects of their German sojourns on their postgraduates. Exposure to hard ma-terialist reductionism (of the Dubois-Reymond variety) and “scientific humanism” (as con-ceived by Ernst Haeckel), both in the ascendant at this time, could not but lead them to ques-tion the faithful convictions their teachers had striven so hard to inculcate.14 On the otherhand, the future prosperity of the Union depended on its brightest sons (daughters hardly fig-uring) mastering the scientific and technological developments in which Germany now stoodpreeminent. G. S. Hall, in his 1881 Aspects of German Culture, roundly sided with the needfor commitment to the approaches that were proving so fruitful in Germany. The shift withinPsychology needs to be viewed in a broader context as one facet of a more widespread processof cultural renegotiation between the New and Old Worlds regarding the natures both of ad-vanced education and of science itself. Anchoring both in a primarily Protestant theologicalframework was no longer sufficient, or even perhaps possible.

Pragmatism philosophically underwrote post-McCoshian U.S. functionalist Psychologyto no less an extent than intuitional realism underwrote his. The idea of an abandonment ofphilosophy as marking the distinctive character of the “New Psychology” is thus somethingof an exaggeration. It might equally be said that after about 1910, U.S. philosophy abandonedPsychology, having first, in pragmatism, provided it with a more scientifically acceptable ra-tionale.15 It was U.S. philosophy, rather than Psychology, which, in the first instance, reactedmost strongly against the mental and moral philosophy tradition. If the climate of psycholog-

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13. This facet of the story cannot be dealt with here. See Brent (1993) and Menand (2001) for information on thecovert role of Peirce’s brief period at Johns Hopkins University and of the Metaphysical Club group generally. EvenPeirce, however, was never antireligious and became increasingly concerned with religion in the later years of his life.

14. See, for example, Connecticut Board of Education Secretary Birdsey Grant Northrop’s Education Abroad andOther Papers of 1873.

15. Pragmatism and positivism cannot be equated, but in practice their apparent implications for philosophy of sci-ence, especially as far as methodology was concerned, rapidly converged. One important difference, of course, isthat the rejection of strict determinism was a central aim of pragmatism (at least the Jamesian version), while posi-tivism simply abandoned it as superfluous for methodological purposes, as adding nothing to correlational proposi-tions. Positivism nevertheless retained the deterministic materialistic “spirit.” I am conscious however that the treat-ment of pragmatism given here is very superficial, there being important differences between the Peirce, James, andDewey versions, and between the early and late Peirce. See Leszek Kolakowski (1968/1972, chap. 7) for a brief andaccessible account of these and the subtleties of the positivism-pragmatism relationship. It is also of course possibleto read pragmatism in a fundamentally antipositivist fashion, as is currently now being done by many in the “socialconstructionist” and “mutualist” camps.

ical ideas in Britain was dominated by the empiricism of J. S. Mill, Bain, and the Darwinians(with F. H. Bradley’s idealism as the opposition) and in Germany by Idealrealismus and thelater quest for a rapprochement between positivist science and the preservation of Bildung(Ash, 1995) it was in the United States that a version of Scottish Realism, albeit increasinglyleavened by neo-Kantianism, held sway. Since it was against this background that AmericanPsychology most directly emerged, the neglect of this tradition by disciplinary historians (dis-cussed in G. Richards, 1992a) grows ever more curious. Nor, let it be said, were the nonaca-demic strands in the American philosophical ancestry of the New Psychology particularly re-spectable from the new positivist and pragmatist perspectives: New EnglandTranscendentalism (with which William James was deeply imbued), neo-Kantianism (towhich Porter and Laurens P. Hickock had in any case made concessions), and the “St. LouisHegelian” school having their own more covert inputs alongside the historiographically fa-vored lineage of British associationism and mid-nineteenth-century German materialism (it-self a somewhat chimerical beast) (see Boller, 1974, on New England Transcendentalism;Goetzmann, 1973, on the St. Louis Hegelians). Associationism was also being promoted be-yond academia, one should note, by the New York lawyer Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (anearly contributor to Mind, whose huge, but apparently totally forgotten, two-volume A Systemof Psychology (1884) was steeped in the Bain, Mill, and Spencer tradition). On both conti-nents, it was ultimately the rise of evolutionary thought that precipitated Psychology’s even-tual integration (such as it was) as an autonomous discipline, and all three major philosophi-cal traditions—Rationalist Idealism, Associationism, and Scottish Realism—found ways ofresponding positively to that. Certainly McCosh did.

Viewing McCosh’s case then, we may begin to discern certain possibilities opening up thatoffered routes for emancipation from Porter’s Problem. In the first place, the growing exposureto European schools of philosophical and Psychological thought, combined with the domesticemergence of pragmatism, was undermining the authority of Scottish Realism (however modi-fied in some cases by neo-Kantianism or French eclecticism) as an adequate philosophical sys-tem. It was, however, less its purely philosophical virtues than its explicitly religious characterthat was most significant in relation to the current question. None of the new philosophicalschools that underpinned contemporary science shared this, all being fundamentally secular incharacter. If Psychology was to continue the moral mission of its predecessor, it would have todo so in other than religious terms, at least for “scientific” purposes. And not only for purposesof academic moral education, for it was under increasing pressure to address broader social is-sues such as “idiocy,” crime, and child rearing in a public arena, which was constitutionally sec-ular. However personally pious American psychologists were (and at this point most of themwere), it was “scientific,” not theological, authority that had to legitimate this public practice.That it would strive to continue this moral mission was of course essential for its cultural suc-cess, and as previously noted, this was in part facilitated and reinforced by the foundation of nu-merous nondenominational universities during the 1870s and 1880s (a development that, inturn, signified the same cultural dynamic). Secondly, McCosh’s acceptance of evolution (whichPorter notoriously rejected in his banning of Herbert Spencer’s 1873 The Study of Sociology asa course book) could not help but open up the possibility of genuinely new scientific knowledgeabout human nature coming to light—and contemporary British and mainland European evolu-tionists were, with great gusto, claiming to be doing just this. The intrinsically interesting natureof evolutionists’ purported “scientific discoveries” on the matter rendered their appeal irre-sistible. As already mentioned, Baldwin was initially concerned with reconciling evolution withScottish Realist philosophy. More darkly, however, these discoveries were widely read as im-plying a rather gloomier interpretation of human nature than that offered by Protestant

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Christianity (itself hardly sunny!)—along with evolutionary thought, America also imported thedegenerationist panic. But for contemporary Psychology, this would prove something of abonus, for it reinforced the practical importance and relevance of the discipline not just to themoral edification of the educated elite but for society’s problems at large.

BETWEEN “MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY” AND THE “NEW PSYCHOLOGY”

The final transition from mental and moral philosophy to the New Psychology appears,in retrospect, to have happened very rapidly. The “revolutionary” story once favored by his-torians reinforces the impression that American academia flipped almost instantaneouslyfrom one stable state to another in the early 1880s. This image has been gained at the expenseof ignoring at least two significant transitional figures: John Bascom (1827–1911), presidentof the University of Wisconsin (1874–1887) and a noted preacher, and David Jayne Hill(1850–1932), president of Bucknell University (1879–1888), then of the University ofRochester (1889–1896), and later U.S. ambassador to Germany (1908–1911).16

To begin with, it is instructive to compare Bascom’s Science of Mind (1881) with JohnDewey’s Psychology (1886/1890) since they would generally be viewed as falling on either sideof the great divide between the old philosophical Psychology and the New Psychology.According to Boring (1957, p. 552), Dewey’s text was “the first attempt by an American to writea text for the ‘new’ psychology,” and Murphy & Kovach (1972/1979, p. 219) note Dewey’s rolein the functionalist shift from “statics to dynamics.” The first thing that strikes one is that theoverall structure of the two works is identical, each being divided into three major sections—Bascom: The Intellect, The Feelings, The Will; Dewey: Knowledge, Feeling, The Will. Both dealwith such topics as Perception, Memory, and Imagination in exactly the same order. In dis-cussing The Will (or “volition”), both start from the same point: “Exertion is prompted by feel-ing, is anticipated and guided by thought, is maintained and initiated by volition” (Bascom,1881, p. 369); “It . . . connects the content of knowledge with the form of feeling” (Dewey,1886/1890, p. 347). In both, The Will was thus conceived as the middle integrating term in re-lating thought or knowledge with feeling. As far as “dynamics” are concerned, Bascom ends hissections with chapters on “The Dynamics of the Intellect,” “. . .of the Feelings,” and “. . .of TheWill,” respectively. There is no doubt of course that Dewey was the far subtler thinker who alsomore comprehensively referenced his sources. My present point is that the agendas Bascom andDewey were setting themselves are, on the face of it, nigh on identical. Nor was Bascom’s awork of purely armchair speculation; he too was liberal in his references to Carpenter, Bain,Ferrier, and Spencer, as well as to Hamilton and Mill, and (unlike Dewey) included engravingsof the nervous system and brain. His Comparative Psychology (1878) was similar in these re-spects. Admittedly not all would agree that this Dewey-Bascom comparison is fair. Fay (1939)notes that Dewey’s Psychology is “Janus-like,” and that G. S. Hall lumped it with the olderschool, in contrast to Ladd’s Outlines of Descriptive Psychology (1886/1898), which he hails(but Ladd had taken over Noah Porter’s course at Yale in 1881 as a Porter appointee!17). Evenaccepting this, however, the fact remains that the transition between their two Psychologies is

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16. See Bates (1929) for an account of Bascom’s career and Brozek (1984) on Hill.

17. According to Eugene S. Mills (1969), during the winter of 1879/1880 Ladd “traveled to New Haven... He met anumber of Yale scholars for the first time and had several conferences with President Porter. Ladd made frequentvisits to New Haven in 1880 and early 1881, each time visiting President Porter for a discussion of their mutual in-terests in Psychological and philosophical problems. The friendship and respect that developed from these confer-ences led ultimately to an invitation to join the Yale faculty” (p. 74). I am grateful to Robert Wozniak for drawingthis passage to my attention. See also O’Donnell (1985, pp. 105–109).

not the abrupt break most historians have hitherto identified. In light of reexaminations by his-torians such as O’Donnell (1985) and Wozniak (1992), we are now surely justified in askingwhich among the New Psychology’s founding texts from this period was not “Janus-faced”?E. W. Scripture’s Thinking, Feeling, Doing of 1895 was the first unambiguously experimentallyoriented textbook.

Was Bascom aware of “Porter’s Problem”? In the 1869 first edition of his The Principlesof Psychology, of which Mental Science was in effect a revised version, he certainly cameclose, though was somewhat more confessedly confused and less sure of how to proceed thanPorter. This is apparent in several passages in the earlier introductory part of the work. Havingsaid that language is, for Psychology, “the chief instrument of investigation,” he proceeded:

The very sense of existence is largely due in mental facts to a clear, specific, generallyrecognized name; since we handle the states of philosophy exclusively through theirnames and without these, readily lose all traces of them. Moreover these names are ap-plied somewhat in the dark. It is by description and suggestion that we are taught whatthe internal states are to which given words are set apart. . . . A further obstacle presentedby language is, that it comes to mental phenomena saturated with the imagery of the ex-ternal world. Words are born amid sensible facts, and thence transferred to the mind. . . .The mind reaching this interior analogical thread of interpretation is pleased by it, andoverlooks the fact, that investigation is thus sure to be lead astray, to be turned entirelyfrom true mental phenomena, and to be sent wandering among the shadows and reflec-tions of the external world. (pp. 21–22)

But barely a page later: “Language, as the product of the mind, as the external visible trace ofthe mind’s movements, reveals of course the forms of its action, and, in the designations ofmental phenomena, a part at least of the facts of the interior world” (p. 23); while just a littleearlier he had observed, “Much skill and time are . . . consumed between different observersin drawing attention to the same [mental] facts. They often, through the descriptive effect ofagreeing words, seem to have attained this result, when they have not attained it, and thus fallinto inextricable confusion and contradiction” (pp. 19–20).

These passages suggest that Bascom himself was not immune to “inextricable confusionand contradiction.” In a manner reminiscent of Porter’s views on everyday language, in thesecond quotation he saw language as a direct embodiment of the forms of psychological phe-nomena—hence, presumably it is unchallengeable primary data in its own right. Yet in thefirst, he complained that two people may be using the same words but with totally differentmeanings and in the third, again like Porter, he cautions against reliance of imagery drawnfrom the external world (acknowledging the origins of words as lying in “sensible facts,” i.e.,external world phenomena) and seems to believe there is a realm of “true mental phenomena”beyond this language, though he made no suggestions as to how we should then refer to them.Porter had only gone so far as to warn against being misled by “false analogons”; Bascom, inthe first passage, appears to imply that all “analogons” are essentially misleading and erro-neous, in direct contradiction to what he says in the second passage a page later. If his treat-ment of the problem is barely coherent, Bascom did, nonetheless, attempt to tackle it. Yet thevery incoherence of this attempt seems to be symptomatic of a definite impatience with theissue and a wish to move on to more concrete scientific matters.

Bascom’s later transitional position bears a close resemblance to that adopted by DavidJayne Hill in his Elements of Psychology (1888), the subject of a paper by the late J. Brozek(1984). Like Bascom, Hill was a university president (at Rochester), although the book waswritten while he was Professor of Psychology and Ethics at Lewisburg (later, Bucknell), thefirst U.S. Professor of Psychology officially called such (an honor usually given to J. M. Cattell

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at Pennsylvania). Hill began teaching Psychology as early as 1880. As Brozek demonstrates,his Elements of Psychology is a curious, occasionally inconsistent blend of Scottish mental phi-losophy and experimental or empirical “scientific” Psychology, including citations of mostcontemporary European psychologists including Bain, Galton, Ribot, Taine, and Wundt, aswell as relevant physiological work by Ferrier and Carpenter. In 1893, Hill published GeneticPhilosophy, where his position had moved from traditional mind-body dualism to a form ofmonism and in which the developmental (“genetic”) orientation was further developed. HadHill remained in academia after 1896 instead of moving to politics and diplomacy, one suspectshe would regularly figure as a “founding father” instead of having faded into obscurity (evenO’Donnell fails to notice him). He had, after all, spent part of his 1888–1889 sabbatical trav-eling in southern Europe with G. S. Hall, who was six years his senior. The main difference be-tween Bascom and Hill was in the latter’s more orthodox “Scottish” philosophical position.

What was at issue between Bascom and those like Dewey was not, in the first instance,the subject matter or the relevance of empirical information but, again, underlying philo-sophical orientation. In Bascom’s case, the philosophical hobbyhorse he was riding was to at-tack what he saw as the illogical reductionist conclusions to which Spencer, Bain, andCarpenter were driven (anxieties akin to Porter’s). More specifically, in ComparativePsychology, he developed a quite detailed argument to the effect that as consciousnessevolves, it, as we would now say, feeds back ever deeper downward into the organic level:“Increments are decisive, and are enlarged downwards—they are not evolved upward.”Intelligence is a new factor that modifies and “partially displaces” even its prior action—“itis not this prior action that slowly divulges itself as intelligence” (p. 146).18 He reserved par-ticular incredulity for the doctrine of “unconscious cerebration”: “A sub-conscious state,where is it? what is it? what are its efficiencies? . . . The prefix sub, in sub-conscious, doesnot help us, any more than would sub-space or super-space” (pp. 21–22).

This hostility was also present at the outset of Bascom (1869/1875), where he made a cat-egorical assertion that “facts either occur in space or consciousness” and that a “third state is in-admissible as unknown and unnecessary” (p. 17). It is perhaps worth noting that John Searle(1990), although on quite different grounds, again challenged the meaningfulness of the conceptof an “unconscious.” We ought not patronizingly to dismiss Bascom’s doubts as naïve; the ques-tion remains a live one. Comparative Psychology was intended as an “Intuitionist” account of“. . .the relation between the mature mind and the mind of the infant, between rudimentary anddeveloped powers . . . [and the] . . . still more important connection between the intelligence ofto-day and that of remote previous periods, between the intelligence of man and that of animals,and of the earlier human life from which it has been derived” (p. iv).

Bascom’s philosophical position, as given in the last chapter of Science of Mind, is anadamant defense of faculty-based common-sense intuitionism against both materialism andidealism, with the theological level let-out that God “centers and absorbs” both mental andphysical phenomena (see pp. 434 et seq.). He differentiated his position from the “natural re-alism” of Reid and Hamilton (and presumably McCosh), preferring to call it “constructive re-alism.” He wrote, “Constructive realism is realism reached as the result of the combined actionof our perceptions, intuitions and judgments. It is the realism offered in this work” (p. 455).

Like McCosh, Bascom was prepared to engage contemporary “scientific” thought re-garding human nature and, also like McCosh, he came to espouse an evolutionary perspec-tive. Bascom’s view of Mental Science as the study of consciousness in all its aspects (1881,

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18. This point appears to adumbrate J. M. Baldwin’s later qualifications regarding “recapitulation,” especially inBaldwin (1902), and is central to the model proposed in Bickerton (1990).

p. 19) did not differ significantly from William James’s, excepting that the latter’s use of“Mind” rather than “consciousness” allowed the inclusion of those unconscious mental phe-nomena Bascom rejected, and was more orthodox than Dewey’s definition, “the Science ofthe Facts or Phenomena of Self ” (1886/1890, p. 1). The crucial points on which Bascom dif-fered from his successors were his antipathy to crude empiricism (which he saw as reduc-tionist) and his residual theological anxieties. “Porter’s Problem” was still implicitly presentin Bascom’s work but in a weaker fashion, for he never addressed the language issue at anylength and religious concerns were, while ultimately central, differentiated in his discoursefrom Psychological ones, rather than pervading the entire text.

Hill engaged contemporary scientific Psychology in even more depth than Bascom andparted from the New Psychology, if at all, only in continuing to incorporate substantial dis-cussions of philosophical issues and tending to use a somewhat obsolescent vocabulary. Theworks of Bascom and Hill thus reinforce the case that the New Psychology of the 1880s and1890s in the United States was new more by virtue of its philosophical basis than its actualPsychological agenda. If this new philosophical position more fully ratified empirical and ex-perimental methodologies than its predecessor had done, later mental and moral philosophytexts (such as McCosh’s) were certainly not anti-experimental and often cited the results ofEuropean empirical and experimental work. It would, in fact, take another decade for the newmethodology and a shifting social climate, in their turn, to significantly reshape this agenda.G. T. Ladd is himself an interesting case of someone trapped between the two positions.Although disciplinary historians have cast him, unlike Bascom and Hill, as one of the NewPsychology’s canonical founders, Ladd also continued to be engaged in a distinctivelyProtestant philosophy, which he saw as a higher pursuit: “Psychology represents the first andscientific stage of reflective analysis, and of theoretic synthesis of experience. But philoso-phy is the stage beyond and ultimate. Philosophy involves the further and most complete pos-sible reflective analysis of the problems prepared for it by psychology” (Ladd, 1890, p. 92).Ladd’s view of the relations between the two was thus quite traditional, boiling down to em-pirical Psychology being the handmaiden of philosophy, its “propaedeutic,” supplying it withthe material for higher, rational, integration. (Actually, his position in the chapter just quotedended up sounding surprisingly similar to Bascom’s.) His 1895 Philosophy of Mind, in whichhe expounded what he saw as Psychology’s philosophical basis and status, was a resoundingfailure in the rapidly developing New Psychology. He then went on to publish a two-volumePhilosophy of Religion in 1905, after which his Psychological work was minimal. Two of hislater papers are, however, significant in the present context: “The Child’s Capacity forReligion” (1905b), in which he restated the Porter position that religious belief is the naturaloutcome of a healthy upbringing, and “The Confusion of Pragmatism” (1909), in which heexplicitly rejected what was in effect the New Psychology’s primary philosophical rationale.It was arguably only R. S. Woodworth’s continued revisions of their 1887 textbook Elementsof Physiological Psychology that kept his name visible within Psychology in the new century.

CONCLUSION

Bascom, Hill, and Ladd present major difficulties for the received “revolutionary” plot.(So too, in truth, does G. Stanley Hall himself, who was constantly, even increasingly, preoc-cupied with religious issues throughout his career, although his case cannot be explored fur-ther here, other than to observe that his 1904 magnum opus Adolescence ends with a chapterof advice to missionaries on how best to propagate Christianity.) They show how the NewPsychology was only able initially to emerge within American culture and academia by con-

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serving mental and moral philosophy’s moral agenda, albeit in recouched terms that relievedits essentially conservative pressure by compromising with those scientific evolutionary doc-trines now enjoying the status of concrete knowledge gains futile to resist. Moreover, in onecrucial respect, Porter’s Problem remained intact: the “constructionist” and reflexive implica-tions of the nature of psychological language he had himself evaded only by the unsatisfac-tory strategy of seeming to deny that language was itself a psychological phenomenon, andby portraying existing folk psychological language as a virtually infallible repository of psy-chological knowledge developed over many millennia. Not everyone espoused preciselyPorter’s position, even in the 1870s. W. D. Wilson (1879), for example, presented an interest-ing variant in his paper, “The Influence of Language on Thought.”19 This was almostWhorfian in spirit, exploring in detail some alleged effects of grammar and grammaticalrules, particularly on German, French, and English thought. The French use of the “reflexform” had thoroughly confused their sense of “causation”; hence, their penchant for the ex-tremes of atheism, materialism, sensationalism, and positivism. The ease with which Germanlent itself to compound and abstract terms had made Germans masters of metaphysical spec-ulation, but at the cost of clearness and comprehensibility. English, Wilson concluded, hadstruck a wiser balance, giving “us an immense advantage in reference to the solution of allquestions of ontology, of morality, and of religion” (p. 12). Yet Wilson, like Porter, was un-able to really follow through on his insights into the psychological effects of language, al-though, unlike him, he was clear that it is a psychological phenomenon, opening “Languageis both a product and a producer of thought” (p. 1), and even verged on a radical critique oforthodox Psychological language at one point: “We hear much for instance about ‘ideas’ and‘mental faculties’ without pausing to consider whether there are really any such things;whether ‘ideas’ and ‘faculties’ are anything more than states of mind and modes of its activ-ity” (p. 2). Yet he did not apparently appreciate that psychological language in general raisesspecial difficulties for his position that “words . . . describing what we have seen we inter-pret . . . by the [visible] facts,” but if used to refer to what we have never seen, then “imagi-nation and fancy is at once set to work” (p. 2). Wilson’s deeper aim was nonetheless quite sig-nificant for our present thesis; he was in effect using his proto-Whorfian analysis to vindicateanglophone thought as that best placed, by virtue of its grammatically built-in sense of real-ity, and ability to discriminate between fact and fancy (“objective substances and mere ob-jectified nothings”), to solve the “questions of ontology, of morality, and of religion” in a doc-trinally acceptable fashion. Despite his somewhat startlingly radical proto-Whorfian ideas,Wilson could only deploy them in the service of a patriotic moral agenda.

By the 1880s, nobody any longer insisted on the infallibility of folk psychology, but nei-ther McCosh, Bascom, Hill, Ladd, Hall, nor anyone else apparently had anything to say aboutthe broader psychological language issue during the 1880s and 1890s. That psychological lan-guage was ultimately drawn from that used for referring to the physical world remained undis-puted, but also rarely mentioned, its theoretical implications remaining unappreciated. Whilefor Porter it had been a main plank in his attack on “cerebralists,” for McCosh it apparentlymeant little more than that one should be wary of being misled by physical metaphors (a pointPorter also stressed, as we saw). How serious this danger was thought to be is, in his case, un-

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19. I have been unable to discover more about W. D. Wilson, although he may have been the Reverend W. D. Wilsonassociated with Cornell. Fay (1939) highly praises W. D. Wilson’s Lectures on the Psychology of Thought and Action(1871), which he claims was the first Psychology textbook to include coverage of the nervous system and that thework “might almost be taken for an early production of William James” (p. 489). This suggests he too warrants in-clusion in any fuller reappraisal of the transitional phase.

clear. While nineteenth-century linguists like Dwight Whitney (1876) and Max Müller (1887)were also agreed on this point (if on little else) the long-standing nature of the consensus (ex-tending at least as far back as Locke) meant that it now attracted little explicit mention. Thepoint barely figures in the Psychological work of the transitionalist figures just discussed(though it did raise its head in Bascom’s earliest work) and late nineteenth-centuryPsychologists were paying language scant attention in any case beyond the context of childdevelopment. While C. S. Peirce’s pragmatism was appreciated by a small coterie of associ-ates, notably William James and John Dewey, his “semiotics” was too intrinsically arcane foralmost all his contemporaries and his difficult temperament further hampered the promotionof his cause. As far as linguistics itself was concerned, the great days of Bopp, the Grimmbrothers, Whitney, and Müller had passed. The philological and etymological agenda had be-come more or less exhausted, and the “origin of language” debate had ground to a halt as afutile speculative exercise, while in the 1880s and 1890s Saussurean structural linguistics andPeirce’s semiotics both lay in the future.20

In such a climate, the problematic implications of the nature of psychological languagewere, then, not so much resolved as lost from sight. The enthusiastic scientific temper of theage, which its psychologists (excepting James and Ladd) wholeheartedly shared, coupled withthe exciting “discoveries” and theoretical innovations flooding in following the Darwinianrevolution and European methodological innovations within Psychology, meant that the entirequestion was, almost unconsciously, shelved. At best, there were lamentations overPsychology’s dependence on everyday language for its concepts and insistence on the need toredefine them for scientific use. The possible significance of this dependence as a psycho-logical fact in its own right was left unexamined. This was rendered even easier because itsfundamental theoretical seriousness had never really been confronted anyway, except ar-guably by Porter, who was rendered unable to grasp the nettle by his overriding commitment,both religious and philosophical, to the notion of an enduring unchanging “human nature.”

We might thus see Porter’s own highly visible suppression of the evident construc-tionist implications of the nature of psychological language as, ironically, a positive contri-bution to the emergence of “scientific Psychology” in the United States. In explicitly deny-ing that psychological language has any reflexive effect on that to which it refers, and incasting language in general simply as a vehicle for conveying thoughts rather than amedium in which they are constituted, Porter was paradoxically facilitating the very movehe feared most—the triumph of the “cerebralist” approaches that would seek to explain themind in terms drawn from specific fields of that very “scientific” knowledge the mind hadcreated. The logically foundational position of Psychology as “mother of all sciences”could be safely ignored, while his insistence on an unchanging human nature supported theassumption that Psychology could be a conventional “natural science.” It is worth noting inthis connection that the only two twentieth-century psychologists who, in very differentways, pursued this issue were Europeans, Swiss in fact—J. Piaget and C. G. Jung (onwhom, see Shamdasani, 2003).

It may be felt that this is an overstatement of Porter’s significance or “influence” (adangerous word). For a century now, The Human Intellect has remained largely ignored, un-read, and virtually forgotten. Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Bain’s The Senses and TheIntellect and The Feelings and The Will, Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty . . . thesesurely are the key mid-nineteenth-century English language proto-Psychology texts, not

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 369

20. See Rieber (1980) for a collection containing several relevant papers.

Porter’s massive and, as it looks to us, suffocating treatise? The daunting aspect it now bearsis deceptive. Virtually every American university, college, or seminary student from the1830s to the late 1880s was exposed to a compulsory “Mental and Moral Philosophy”course aimed at instilling and philosophically justifying Protestant doctrinal orthodoxy (un-less they were at Notre Dame). The textbooks published to service these courses were nu-merous, but with some exceptions, and although evolving over time, their contents werevery similar. Some quite early texts, most notably T. C. Upham’s Elements of MentalPhilosophy (1831), remained widely used for decades, going into numerous reprintings;Upham’s book was still going strong in the late 1850s, and Francis Wayland’s The Elementsof Moral Science (1835) was reprinted at least as late as 1875. The position adopted in themajority of these was in many respects similar to Porter’s, but The Human Intellect, ap-pearing relatively late for a classic-style textbook in this genre, rapidly became accepted asan outstanding work, as indicated at the beginning of this article. Its author was alreadyprestigious, its content wide-ranging and up-to-date, it was philosophically relatively so-phisticated by comparison with the majority of its rivals, and its style not in fact as forbid-ding as a first glance suggests. Compared to L. P. Hickock’s Rational Psychology (1861), itis the very essence of succinct lucidity. It went into a fourth edition by 1872, and the NewYork publisher Charles Scribner’s reissued it as late as 1890 and the abridgement, Elementsof Intellectual Science, up to at least 1893.

There can be little doubt that the majority of those American psychologists who en-tered higher education prior to the 1890s encountered one or another version of Porter’stext. It was virtually the “Hilgard & Atkinson” of its day, and James McKeen Cattell spokeof it with respect at the Ninth International Congress of Psychology in 1929 (Cattell,1930). One cannot therefore be taken to task for treating The Human Intellect as the mostarticulate and thorough representative text produced by the “mental and moral philoso-phy” school, nor, by virtue of that fact, for seeing “Porter’s Problem” as intrinsic to thatschool’s position.

Much work remains to be done in unraveling precisely how American mental and moralphilosophers and proto-psychologists managed the transition to a secular natural-scientificPsychology during the 1880s, but a broad hypothesis clearly emerges from the material ex-amined in this article. Whatever other factors were in play, this transition must have involved,if barely consciously, the dual strategy of (a) retaining the moral education agenda (largely ab-sent in Europe) and (b) suppressing or ignoring the “constructionist” implications of the factthat psychological language is derived from “material” language, something that virtuallyeveryone actually took for granted. It is, though, the very covert nature of this strategy thatrenders an exegesis of its management challenging.

It would take nearly a century for Psychology to begin recovering from the effects of thelatter move. In the aftermath of the calamitously destructive first half of the last century,American Psychology came close to swamping alternative European national traditions. Onecentral feature of this Psychology was its continued infusion with both a “moral” agenda andthe positivistic commitment to natural scientific status that drove the New Psychologists ofthe 1880s and 1890s, and the character it had been bequeathed by that dual strategy. EuropeanPsychologies, on the other hand, had, prior to 1939, retained stronger alternative strands anda more relaxed attitude generally to what counted as “science.” They were variously chary ofreductionism (e.g., Gestalt Psychology), frequently “holistic” in approach (e.g., GestaltPsychology again, but E. Spranger and other personality typologists also), more inclined tocreative speculation (e.g., psychoanalysis), less disengaged from philosophy (e.g., the exis-tentialist and phenomenological schools, but also, in the UK, analytical and linguistic philos-

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ophy21), more sensitive to “social constructionist” possibilities (e.g., the earlier F. C. Bartlettof Psychology and Primitive Culture (1923) and Remembering (1932)), less “individualistic”in orientation (e.g., the Frankfurt School), and less concerned with formal methodologicalrigor (e.g., Jean Piaget). Their moral agendas, such as they were, were also highly diverse.

This effectively ceased after the mid-1950s, and a phase of American hegemony beganthat lasted virtually down to the 1980s. Although, like their American counterparts, mostEuropean pioneer psychologists similarly overlooked the psychological language issue, therewere other major elements in its intellectual traditions that would eventually begin forging anexplicitly “social constructionist” synthesis in the later decades of the twentieth century, al-though not all focused on the psychological language issue itself. While not without allies inthe United States, such as Kenneth Gergen or, much earlier, Gardner Murphy (Pandora,1997), “social constructionist” and “critical” Psychology faced (and faces) far more resis-tance there than in Europe. The final “moral” of the present article is that this resistance isdue to the covert persistence within U.S. Psychology of “Porter’s Problem” and the legacy ofthe ultimately invalid moves made in order to outflank it during its foundational phase. Andinsofar as U.S. Psychology came to dominate Psychology internationally after 1945, soPsychology everywhere came to be similarly affected. But there is one more twist. It is duein no small part to the labors of North American historians of Psychology since 1980 that wenow find ourselves in a position to see this.22 If history of Psychology was for so long the dis-cipline’s compliantly celebratory servant, its own findings are now compelling it to adopt amore critical stance and to realize its own value as an autonomous subdiscipline.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the help and enthusiasm of Robert W. Rieber and, long ago, Robert Wozniak in helpingme with this paper, which has mutated through various forms over a number of years. This research was supportedby an Emeritus Research Grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

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