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The Metaphysical Club at the Johns Hopkins University (1879–1885)

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The Metaphysical Club at the Johns Hopkins University (1879–1885) History of Psychology Copyright 2005 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2005, Vol. 8, No. 4, 331–346 1093-4510/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1093-4510.8.4.331 THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY (1879–1885) Peter J. Behrens The Pennsylvania State University Of the earliest American universities, The Johns Hopkins in Baltimore holds a unique position for psychology. At Hopkins, many of America’s first psychologists received their graduate training. Of special interest is the Hopkins Metaphysical Club, organized in 1879 by Charles Sanders Peirce. It provided a forum for research and scholarship by faculty and students. Papers related to topics of the “new” psychology began to appear in 1883, about the time G. Stanley Hall was given a 3-year appointment at Hopkins. When Peirce departed Hopkins in 1885, Hall was free to develop psychology in his image and disbanded the club. Nevertheless, the Metaphysical Club played an important role in the emergence of American scientific psychology. Widely understood among historians of psychology is the fact that The Johns Hopkins University played a significant role in the development of American psychology. G. Stanley Hall held the position as the first full-time professor of psychology, when he was appointed professor of psychology and pedagogics at Hopkins in 1883; Hopkins’ graduates were among the first generation of psy- chologists in America, which included John Dewey, James McKeen Cattell, Christine Ladd, and Joseph Jastrow; and Hopkins was an inspiration to, if not a model for, other American universities for graduate education with its emphasis on laboratory research, the seminar, and academic freedom (Veysey, 1965). Largely overlooked, however, is the place of the Hopkins Metaphysical Club—its functioning, role, and impact—on the history of 19th-century American science and philosophy in general and the emergence of psychology as a distinct discipline in particular. The argument here is that the club was a supportive context for ideas, research, and scholarship during its existence and assumed an important role for the Hopkins community and the development of American psychology, distinct from philosophy and biology, in the last quarter of the 19th century. Original membership in the Metaphysical Club in 1879 was 26 faculty and This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. Peter J. Behrens is assistant professor of psychology at the Lehigh Valley Campus of The This article is intended solely for the personal use of individual user and not to be disseminated broadly. Pennsylvania State University. He teaches undergraduate courses in psychology and engages in research on American psychology prior to 1939. He also holds a Pennsylvania psychologist license and maintains an independent practice as a counseling psychologist in Bethlehem, PA. This research was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RY-20386-84) and grants from The College of the Liberal Arts and Commonwealth Education System of The Pennsylvania State University. A version of this paper was read at the 100th Annual Convention of the American Psycho- logical Association in Washington, DC, August 1992. I wish to express my appreciation for the cooperation of James Stinson, archivist, Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peter J. Behrens, Penn State Lehigh Valley, 8380 Mohr Lane, Fogelsville, PA 18051. E-mail: [email protected] 331 332 BEHRENS students from biology, engineering, chemistry, the arts, and philosophy. Changes to the membership roll occurred but were infrequently noted in the minutes and then only in the early years. The minutes of each meeting identified presenters and those who made substantive contributions to the discussions. Typically, the club met monthly between October and May on Tuesday evenings during the fall and spring terms. Meetings took place over the years in various rooms set aside for instruction among the several inconspicuous buildings that comprised the univer- sity in the mid-1880s (French, 1946). Between 1879 and 1885 a total of 43 meetings were held. The club never received widespread recognition outside of the university, and, indeed, one is hard-pressed to find any mention of it in the later writings of its former members (Brent, 1998). But the club’s proceedings over the years suggest it offers a unique perspective both on intellectual life at Hopkins and on the development of American psychology through the members who contributed their research and scholarship. There is even a link between several members of the Metaphysical Club and the American Psychological Association, established 7 years after the club ceased to exist. Charles Peirce and the Founding of the Hopkins Metaphysical Club Rather than as a college, The Johns Hopkins was established as a graduate university by its trustees, who had studied the best institutions of the United States and Europe and were determined not to follow any precedent—German, French, or English. They sought to “devise from all sources such experience and recom- mendations as might be adapted to this country and lead in course of time to an American University based upon our own educational system, and fitted to meet the needs and wants of our own scholars” (Annual Report, p. 8; Johns Hopkins University [JHU], 1878). Of particular importance were several initiatives unique to the landscape of American higher education at the time: the establishment of various methods of instruction, a large number of teachers in proportion to students, abandonment of the traditional class system, the participation of uni- versity fellows in laboratory activities, and the encouragement of teachers to publish. It also held the distinct position of a research university in the service of emerging technology and industry (Feldman & Desrochers, 2004). Within this context of university organization, Charles S. Peirce (1839– 1914), unsuccessful in several previous attempts to gain an academic position, was appointed part-time lecturer in logic for the fall 1879 term on the recom- mendation of his close friend and colleague at Harvard, William James, to Hopkins’ President Daniel Gilman (Menand, 2001; Murphy, 1961). Charles was This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. the son of Benjamin Peirce, who held a chair in astronomy and mathematics at This article is intended solely for the personal use of individual user and not to be disseminated broadly. Harvard. By some accounts he was the first “world-class” American mathemati- cian (Menand, 2001). Upon his arrival in Baltimore in the fall of 1879, Peirce undertook the process of organizing a Metaphysical Club at Hopkins, which joined the short list of other “learned societies” (French, 1946). As recalled by Christine Ladd, a student of Peirce and later a distinguished psychologist in her own right, he used a class session in his logic course to announce the formation of the club (Fisch & Cope, 1952). Peirce was no stranger to intellectual societies. He had considerable connection to and influence on the famous Cambridge Metaphysical Club, about HOPKINS METAPHYSICAL CLUB 333 which much has been written (Brent, 1998; Fisch, 1981; Menand, 2001). The Cambridge club existed informally from about 1871–1874 and counted Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Fiske, Henry Bowen, and Chauncy Wright, among others, as members. Unfortunately, there were no minutes kept, no records of attendance, and meetings were at the mercy of competing schedules and professional responsibilities of its members. In the end, the club unraveled for a variety of reasons, including the untimely death of Wright and reforming efforts of Harvard President Charles Eliot (Menand, 2001). Recent scholarly attention to the Cambridge Metaphysical Club is in connection with the origin of Peirce’s pragmatism. In forming the Hopkins Metaphysical Club, Peirce based it, in part, on the Cambridge model of shared scholarship and intellectual expression, although the informal organization of the Cambridge club lent Peirce little help for a structure of the Hopkins club. Nevertheless, Peirce, no doubt, was eager to put his mark on the development of Hopkins and impress the adminis- tration, particularly President Gilman, given the circumstances that President Eliot had banned him from the Harvard campus and that he was hired only as a part-time instructor on a year-to-year contract at Hopkins (Brent, 1998; Menand, 2001). Peirce’s interest in and dedication to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, expanding at an unprecedented pace during the last quarter of the 19th century, cannot be underestimated. He was, after all, a scientist, and the intellectual environment fostered by the Hopkins administration in the service of science and the practical arts must have given him great hope. Peirce had been engaged in such pursuits with the Coast Geodetic Survey from 1870, when he took part in the expedition to Europe authorized by Congress to study the solar eclipse (Fisch, 1981). Between 1871 and 1878, the Coast Survey had made Peirce responsible for two fields of astronomical research. In addition, his scientific interests prior to Hopkins were in chemistry, in which he took his bachelor of science from the Lawrence Scientific School in 1861. Spectroscopy, metrology, and physics also occupied his career before Hopkins. The new university, only in its second full year of operation when he was engaged, was possibly Peirce’s realization of the dream of a community of scholars, a community that counted him as a member, in the service of a rapidly expanding industrial society (Murphy, 1961). At the encouragement of President Gilman and the board of trustees, various scholarly associations were started at Hopkins in support of the goals of the institution. The associations, societies, or clubs, as they were called, were of considerable importance in creating interdisciplinary communication, faculty- student collegiality, and a forum for visitors with special topics.
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