Stanley Hall

Granville Stanley Hall, President Emeritus of Clark University (see MILESTONES), may be remembered more as an educator or a divine than a scientist, but science will never be able to repay the debt it owes him. He did two supreme things:

1. Brought the science of physchology in America almost singlehanded out of the miasma of metaphysics into the clear white light of experimental rationalism. Pupil of Wilhelm Wundt, he caught the physiological genius of that great founder, and built his theory strictly on the neurological basis of the human body. Hall's wide-ranging, liberal and incisive intelligence took him into many special fields. It made him the dean of the genetic psychologists, with a sympathetic and encyclopedic knowledge of infancy and adolescence (the subject of his greatest work). It distinguished him in the comparative psychology of animals. He was the first American psychologist to give any credit to psychoanalysis, and though always critical of its pretensions, he brought it sharply to the attention of the scientific world by inviting Freud, Jung, Jones, Ferenczi, Brill and other leading psychologists of Europe and America to a conference at Worcester in 1907, at which they fraternized with James and other leading academic psychologists. Hall wasted no time striving for perfect psychological orthodoxy, and was sometimes a bit under suspicion with his colleagues. But his mind was always open, he trained and inspired many of America's first rank psychologists today, and to the end he maintained a lively curiosity for all schools and views. 2. As first President of Clark University, called from Johns Hopkins in 1887 to organize it, he built the greatest research faculty in America, comparable only with Hopkins. With his Continental university training, he saw the need for intensive graduate work in the sciences, and he gathered together in a few famous departments a galaxy of great minds scarcely yet duplicated in our leading universities. They included Michelson and Webster in physics, Whitman in biology, Chamberlain in anthropology, Blakeslee in international law, Sanford in psychology. Hall was not only the moving spirit in assembling them, but he was their direct inspiration to a new and higher type of University product, giving them the facilities, appreciation and moral support that are the life blood of scientific achievement. Dr. Hall's last book, Confession of a Psychologist (Appleton) is the unique revelation of the mind of one of America's greatest men--at 77 years of age, a mind of complete candor, fearlessness, humanity.