Moreover, I was now impressed with the lack of agreement among structural system-makers in regard to conscious elements and their attributes. I wrote a paper for Professor Titchener's seminar, which I occasionally attended in 1900-1901, comparing the structural systems of Wundt, Ebbinghaus, and Münsterberg; and showing how completely they were at variance in their conceptions of element and attribute. Titchener reacted strongly against this paper: I cannot remember what his specific objections were, but I realized the awe in which he was now held by his students when a member of the class came to me next day with sympathy for his 'injustice,' which no one had ventured to point out the night before! It had not occurred to me to be depressed by Titchener's criticisms; it was exciting to 'draw blood' from him. The paper appeared in Volume XI of the Philosophical Review, and I later found that it was welcomed by some of the rising school of functional psychologists as helping to demonstrate the uselessness of structural psychology.
In the second year of this later sojourn at Cornell I was appointed, with Titchener's very kind and cordial consent, a lecturer in psychology, and gave a course in social psychology based to some extent on Wundt's Völkerpsychologie (the volumes on speech were the only ones published at that time); and a course in animal psychology. My colleagues in the Department were Bentley, Whipple, and Baird, and one of my pupils was Robert Gault.
I wrote in this year another paper which indicated departure from Titchenerian doctrine; it tried to show the impossibility of regarding duration as an attribute of sensations.[p. 345]
Since this dissatisfaction with extreme structuralism was accompanied by a growing interest in motor processes, it might seem that functional psychology, now coming to the fore, would have been a refuge. Several influences kept me out of it. For one thing, it was the child of pragmatism, which was itself sponsored by Dewey and James. Professor Dewey is undoubtedly one of the few great leaders of American thought, and I have felt the charm of his character and personality, but, through some congenital disability, I cannot read him. And James, despite the enduring influence of his psychology, as a philosopher inspired me with distrust. The doctrine that ideas are true in proportion as they 'work' may too readily be used to mean that they are true in proportion as they are comfortable. Moreover, as Bentley pointed out in a review of Angell, after abandoning the description of conscious processes, functional psychology had little left to say except to show how they served 'the welfare of the organism.' Also, if it really meant that mental processes as such had significance for bodily welfare, this was interactionism, and I could not and cannot tolerate it.
Being a 'warden' and having to concern oneself with the behavior of other people was highly uncongenial, and when, at the end of two years, I was offered an assistant professorship in full charge of psychology at the University of Cincinnati, where Dr. Howard Ayers was President, I eagerly accepted it, though I disliked going so far from my parents. I was the only woman of professorial rank on the faculty, and President Ayers took especial pains to treat me, as we sat around a long table at faculty meetings, on a footing of perfect equality with the men. Judd had just resigned the charge of this laboratory to go to Chicago. My colleagues were an exceptionally able group, including, for example, Michael F. Guyer in biology, Louis T. More in physics, and F. Hicks, later President of the University, in economics. A drawback at Cincinnati was the quality of the student material. The University was compelled to admit all graduates of city high schools, and at the end of my first term I had to condition half my introductory class. The place offered, however, many opportunities, but it is hard for a deeply rooted Easterner to be transplanted. When I sat in the station and heard the train called for "Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse-Albany," the sound was sweet in my ears, and I can still remember the thrill of happiness that came with the first stir of the car wheels on their eastward journey. I was thankful when President Taylor in the spring of [p. 346] 1903 called me to Vassar as Associate Professor of Philosophy. There I could spend every Sunday with my parents, who were living only sixteen miles away.
Psychology at Vassar since Dr. Taylor gave it up had been taught by the Professor of Philosophy, H. Heath Bawden, a pupil of Dewey's and an inspiring teacher, who had made considerable reputation as a member of the pragmatist group. He had established the beginnings of a psychological laboratory in the basement of the building dedicated to biology. All the work in psychology was turned over to me, with the addition of a semester's course in ancient philosophy and one in modern philosophy. No one will care to read an account of the progress of courses in psychology at Vassar: it is enough to note that an independent department was formed in 1908 and that the laboratory now occupies more than half of a three-story and basement building.
In order to give the senior students in psychology a glimpse of research methods, a few simple experimental problems were devised each year, whose results, if they worked out successfully, appeared in the American Journal of Psychology as "Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Vassar College." The problem and method of a study having been determined by me, the experimenting was done by the students, who also formulated the results; the interpretation and writing of the reports fell to me and the paper was published under our joint names. Fifty-seven such studies have appeared. Only three times have we conferred the master's degree in psychology; the college does not accept candidates for the doctorate. Personally, I deprecate graduate study for women at any but coeducational universities.
In my first year at Vassar (1903-1904) I wrote a short article developing the idea that both the capacity of making sensory discriminations and that of recalling memory ideas have been dependent on the possibility of delaying reaction, a possibility which arose from the development of distance receptors. Two years later the importance of these receptors for mental development was pointed out by Sherrington in The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. In 1904 I read before the Psychological Association a paper showing some of the difficulties involved in the Wundtian tri-dimensional theory of feeling, and expounding the idea that feeling is the unanalyzed remainder out of which sensations have emerged; the power of analysis having been earliest developed where it was most needed,[p. 347] that is, with reference to outside stimuli. The genetic point of view was much in my mind during these years, and so were kinaesthetic processes. To the Stanley Hall Festschrift in 1903 I contributed the suggestion that the social reference of certain conscious states, e.g., the thought of another's suffering, had as its nervous basis kinaesthetic processes from certain incipient reactions, for instance the impulse to help. At a symposium on the term 'feeling,' held at the 1905 meeting of the Association, I defined feeling as the unanalyzed and unlocalized portion of experience, and suggested that James's feelings of 'but' and 'if' might be the remnants of ancestral attitudes. James was present and approved of the idea.
If this were an emotional instead of an intellectual autobiography, an almost morbidly intense love of animals would have to be traced to its occult sources. Animal psychology began to occupy me when I gave a course on it at Cornell. During a six-weeks' stay at Ithaca in the summer of 1905, I collaborated with Dr. Bentley in some experiments on color vision in a brook fish which he captured from a neighboring stream. The chub learned with great speed, in spite of lacking a cortex; it discriminated both dark and light red from green. Our method of eliminating the brightness error by varying the brightness of the red was inadequate, but later investigators have confirmed our results. Shortly after this, I began to collect and organize literature on animal behavior. The Animal Behavior Series, which the Macmillans published under Dr. Yerkes' editorship, brought out the first edition of The Animal Mind in 1908. While the objective school of interpretation, represented in America chiefly by Loeb, had long urged that much animal conduct should be regarded as unaccompanied by mind, no one had then suggested that all animal behavior, still less that all human behavior, is unconscious, and the patterns of animal consciousness seemed to me then, as they do now, well worth investigating and perfectly open to investigation.
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One of the difficulties in writing these recollections has been that the present is so much more interesting than the past. It is hard to keep one's attention on reminiscence. Scientific psychology in America -- though not, alas! in Germany, its birthplace -- seems fuller of promise than ever before. The behaviorists have stimulated the development of objective methods, while configurationism is reasserting the importance of introspection; and, best of all, pure psychology is enlisting young men of excellent ability and a far sounder general scientific training than that possessed by any but a few of their predecessors.