Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

Volume III

Michael Wertheimer, Gregory A. Kimble

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317759461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This third volume in a series devoted to luminaries in the history of psychology--features chapter authors who are themselves highly visible and eminent scholars. They provide glimpses of the giants who shaped modern cognitive and behavioral science, and shed new light on their contributions and personalities, often with a touch of humor or whimsy and with fresh personal insights. The animated style, carefully selected details, and lively perspective make the people, ideas, and controversies in the history of psychology come alive. The fields touched on in this and other volumes cover all of the subfields of psychology. As such, all volumes of Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology will be of interest to psychologists, as well as scholars in related fields. The resourceful teacher could use a selection of chapters as supplementary readings to enhance almost any course in the discipline. The major purpose of these books is to provide source materials for students and their teachers in undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of psychology. Each of the five volumes in this series contains different profiles thereby bringing more than 100 of the pioneers in psychology more vividly to life.

Chapter 1

Laurens Perseus Hickok: Philosopher, Theologian, and Psychologist

John K. Bare

In his history of psychology, Robert I. Watson (1963) began his chapter on William James as follows: “In the United States before the 1880’s there were two major psychological traditions—phrenology and Scottish psychology…. Scottish psychology had been the heir to the associationistic tradition…[and] it was used as a defense of revealed religion” (p. 317). Hunt (1993) echoed Watson: “The only forms of psychology then taught [in 1875] in the United States were phrenology and Scottish mental philosophy, an offshoot of associationism used chiefly as a defense of religion” (p. 150).

Laurens Perseus Hickok, (1854), author of the college text Empirical Psychology, might have accused both Watson and Hunt of committing an error of omission, and other historians of psychology would agree. Evans (1983) described Hickok as “perhaps the most widely read early American textbook writer of the German Idealist tradition” (p. 47); Harms (1972) referred to him as “America’s first major psychologist” (p. 120); and Viney, Wertheimer, and Wertheimer (1979) described the second edition of Hickok’s Empirical Psychology as “a typical pre-Jamesian U.S. psychology text” (p. 88).

Evaluations of Learning Perseus Hickok in his Own Time

The May 8, 1888 edition of The New York Times carried an obituary of Hickok, which is quoted here in part:

Laurens Perseus Hickok, formerly President of Union College, and widely known throughout the world as a metaphysician of profound learning, died in Amherst, Mass., on Sunday, in the ninetieth year of his age. Dr. Hickok was born in Bethel, Conn., Dec. 29, 1798, was graduated from Union College in 1820, and was licensed as a preacher two years later. He served as Pastor in Newton, Kent, and Litchfield, Conn., until 1836, when he was elected Professor of Theology in the Western Reserve College, Ohio, a position which he held until 1844, when he became Professor of the same branch of the Auburn Theological Seminary. In 1858 he was elected Professor of Mental and Moral Science, and vice-president of Union College, Schenectady. He assisted Dr. Nott in the government of the college for eight years, had sole charge during the succeeding eight years, and was made President March 1, 1866, a post which he resigned in 1868, when he removed to Amherst, retiring from public life at the advanced age of 70. (p. 2, column 4)

At its Founders Day celebration at Union College on March 20, 1947, Herbert W. Schneider (Larrabee, Schneider, & Bixler, 1947), Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, an editor of the Journal of Philosophy, and author of A History of American Philosophy, said:

Laurens Perseus Hickok expounded by far the most elaborate, extravagant, and ambitious system of philosophy ever conceived by an American philosopher. He believed confidently that he had combined into a single, coherent body of self-evident truth, over and above empirical sciences of which he was also a master, the essential truths of the Bible, Plato, Kant, Hegel and Herbert Spencer. Those of us who today try to swim the deep waters of his system soon come to the conclusion that Hickok’s own mind had been drowned in the boundless ocean of pure reason. But Hickok himself had no such fears; he could move in ever larger circles, never coming up for air, and always landing with a sure foot on the further shore of eternity, as though he had steered straight for it all the time. (p. 11)

He…lived in an environment in which it was fashionable to profess faith in revelation, in reason, and in righteousness…and to [try] to unite [them] into a single system, not in the spirit of compromise or toleration but as a rational system…. Faith in reason meant something more technical in Hickok’s day than in ours; it meant that there must be an adequate reason for everything, not merely in the sense that every event must have a cause, but in the sense that every cause must have a reason. Pure science was conceived to be the knowledge of necessary relations, and to be rational meant more than to have a reasonable acquaintance with causes and their effects; it meant to know the principle or law in virtue of which each fact was not mere fact, but an instance of universal rule. (pp. 12–13)

Two Psychologies

Given this description of Hickok’s approach to knowledge, it is not surprising to find that, prior to his Empirical Psychology, Hickok (1849/1973) had authored Rational Psychology. The differences between the two books reflect a distinction first made by Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Wolff, perhaps adopting the claim by Leibniz (1646–1716) that the forms of knowledge are innate and the contents acquired by experience, defined empirical psychology as “the science of what experience tells us about the soul” and rational psychology as “all that is possible to the human soul[,]…a branch of metaphysics…that provides necessarily true statements regarding the essence and the nature of the soul” (Leary, 1982, p. 19).

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1781/1934), employed the rational-empirical distinction to cover knowledge in general, proposing that “knowledge is made of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty for knowing…supplies from itself’ (p. 25). What the faculty for knowing supplies itself “is entitled a priori, and is distinguished from the empirical, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, from experience” (pp. 24–25). Kant also concluded that a rational psychology is not possible, because knowledge of the nature of the soul is “beyond the power of human reason”; and that even empirical psychology “could never be a natural science proper…based on a priori principles because it could never employ mathematics, which provides the rational relationships between empirical data”; and finally that psychology could not even be a good empirical discipline because it could not control its phenomena (Leary, 1978, p. 115).

Hickok sided with Wolff and, in the introduction to his Rational Psychology (1849/1973), compared the empirical and the rational psychology in these terms:

Psychology is the Science of Mind. Empirical Psychology attains the facts of mind and arranges them in a system. The elements are solely the facts given in experience, and the criterion of their reality is the clear testimony of consciousness. Rational psychology is a very different process for attaining to a Science of Mind…. In this science, we pass from the facts of experience wholly out beyond it, and seek for the rationale of experience itself in the necessary and universal principles which must be conditional for all facts of a possible experience. We seek to determine how it is possible for an experience to be, from those a priori conditions which render all the functions of an intellectual agency themselves intelligible. In the conclusions of this science it becomes competent for us to affirm, not as from mere experience… that this is—but from those necessary and universal principles, that this must be. The intellect is itself investigated and known through the a priori principles which must necessarily control all its agency. (pp. 17–18)

As an illustration of what such a science of mind might be, Hickok chose astronomy and, apparently with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton in mind, said:

Astronomy has its sublime and astonishing facts, gathered through a long period of patient and careful observation. Experience has been competent to attain the appearances and movements of the heavenly bodies, the satellites of some of the planets and their relation to their primaries…. The general relationships of different portions of our solar system have in this way been found; the sun put in its place at the center, the planets put in their places in their orbits around it, with the direction, distance and time of periodical revolution accurately determined. A complete diagram of the solar system thus may be made from the results of experience alone, and all that belongs to formal Astronomy be finished. In this process, through experience, we are competent to affirm, so the solar system is. But if now on the other hand beyond experience, we may somehow attain to the conceptions of an invisible force, operating through the system directly as a quantity of matter and inversely as the distance, we shall be competent to take this [conception] as an a priori principle, determining experience itself, and quite independently of all observation may affirm, so the solar system must be. (p. 19)

By analogy, empirical psychology consists of the facts of mind; rational psychology consists of the insights into principles that make those facts inevitable.

Hickok’s Rational Psychology

Although Hickok adopted Wolff’s general position, he was obviously aware of Kant’s assertion that both rational and empirical psychology are impossible. In response to that criticism, Hickok (1849/1973) posed three controversial philosophical questions, examined some of the answers given in the past, and indicated how common consciousness judges rational psychology to be justified.

1. If “the objects given in sense are out of, and in some cases, at a distance from the knowing agent[,]…how may the intellect know that which is out of, and at a distance, from itself?” Hickok replied that, if it is agreed that there must be some representation of the object, then knowledge of the outer world is mediate. Given that knowledge is mediate, with confirmation by “the universal decision of consciousness…we immediately know the outer material world in the perceptions of sensations to be the truth” (p. 43).

2. If we can be convinced that we gain knowledge of the world through perception, how do we put the perceived qualities together to form a thing in itself? How do we “put several qualities not merely into one group in the same place but into one substance existing in the same thing?” (p. 46). How do we come to think of “events not merely as successive in time but as originating in one cause at the same source? [H]ow come we by the notions of substances and causes, and especially how come we by their perpetual order of connection?” (p. 46). Hickok suggested that, if one can find the a priori principles—principles that are givens or intuitively obvious—of the operation of understanding and of the processes of the intellect in its thinking in judgments, then we may “demonstrate also the validity of their being” (pp. 56–57) as objects for the understanding.

3. Is there anything beyond nature that can be known? Is it possible to know whether there is a soul; whether there is a God? Hickok concluded that rational psychology provides the only method for reaching “a final stand on this last and highest point where science and skepticism may grapple in conflict” (p. 8 4). It does so by attaining “the…laws of the faculty of reason, and by knowing reason in its law, may thus lay the foundation for demonstrating the valid being of the Soul in its liberty, and God in His absolute personality” (p. 85).

Hickok’s Empirical Psychology

The introduction to Empirical Psychology (Hickok, 1854) began with a description of “the difficulties and tendencies to error in the study of mind” and a demonstration of how each is to be overcome. The first difficulty is the one that Titchener (chap. 7, Pioneers I), later on would call the stimulus error in psychology: The mind “from its conscious apprehension…turn[s] its attention outwardly to the phenomena of nature [but, to deal with this difficulty] the facts we now need…[require that] the mind…make its own phenomena its study and turn the attention inward upon its own action” (pp. 15–16).

The second difficulty arises from the ambiguity of language: “The common language of mankind is…only an expression of what they find in their daily experience (p. 18). But in mental science [a word] cannot be [a] reference to sensible objects but must carry its meaning over to another mind by inducing the conception of the same mental fact in his own consciousness” (p. 19).

The third difficulty comes from “inadequate conceptions of mental being and [phylogenetic] development,” (p. 21) arising primarily from mechanical and vegetable models. Hickok proposed a view of such development that came from Aristotle. Plants “spontaneously work out [their] organic development” (p. 22). Animals have:

super-added forces of appetitive craving, an instinctive selection of [their] particular food, with the faculty of locomotion to bring [themselves] to it, and the capacity for mastication, digestion, assimilation and incorporation into [their] own substance and thus a growth in the whole system of the body and [their] members. (p. 22)

Human beings, with their:

faculty of judging from sensible experience and thus acting from the dictates of prudence, [with] the distinctive and far more elevated endowment in kind of rational faculty, in its artistic, philosophic, ethic and religious capacities, [thereby have] the prerogatives of action in liberty and moral responsibility, … lifting [them] from the bondage of all necessitated things into the sphere of personality. (p. 22)

In his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (1797/1974), the translator recognized that this volume “is generally referred to as Kant’s work in empirical psychology” (p. ix). Perhaps to show some agreement with Kant, Hickok included in his introduction a chapter on anthropology, subtitled “The Connections of Mind and Body,” which was a condensed version of Kant’s position. It described three influences that have determined the makeup of the human mind: (a) external nature, which has produced “three races from the descendants of Noah”; (b) constitutional organization, which has produced “radical and abiding differences between male and female intellect” (p. 45) as well as the different temperaments (sanguine, melancholic, and choleric); and (c) bodily weakness. The chapter presented Hickok’s only treatment of both the relationship between physiology and behavior and the effects of environmental variables on behavior.

In common with many more recent introductory textbooks, Hickok covered methods in chapter I of his text, imploring the student to be attentive of single facts, “to compare facts with one another and find their true relations” (p. 63), and to analyze complex facts carefully. When facts are disputed, they are to be settled by “the common consciousness of mankind or COMMON SENSE” (p. 67).

The central role of common sense in determining the truth has a history, as Windelband (1901) reminded ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Portraits of the Editors and Authors
• 1. Laurens Perseus Hickok: Philosopher, Theologian, and Psychologist
• 2. Charles Darwin: Father of Evolutionary Psychology
• 3. Leipzig, Wilhelm Wundt, and Psychology’s Gilded Age
• 4. Hermann Ebbinghaus: On the Road to Progress or Down the Garden Path?
• 5. Alfred Binet, General Psychologist
• 6. L. L. Thurstone’s Vision of Psychology As a Quantitative Rational Science
• 7. Kurt Lewin: His Psychology and a Daughter’s Recollections
• 8. Floyd Henry Allport: Founder of Social Psychology As a Behavioral Science
• 9. The Legacy of Jean Piaget
• 10. Karl Duncker: Productive Problems With Beautiful Solutions
• 11. Milton Erickson: Scientist, Hypnotist, Healer
• 12. Zing-Yang Kuo: Radical Scientific Philosopher and Innovative Experimentalist
• 13. Myrtle McGraw: Pioneer in Neurobehavioral Development
• 14. Henry W. Nissen: Quiet Comparative Psychologist
• 15. Carl Rogers and the Culture of Psychotherapy
• 16. Burrhus Frederick Skinner: The Contingencies of a Life
• 17. Kenneth W. Spence: Theorist With an Empiricist Conscience
• 18. David Krech: Scientist and Social Activist
• 19. Benton J. Underwood: A Tribute of Memories
• 20. Leon Festinger: Beyond the Obvious
• Index