iii · Section 8

iii

Naturally, the climax of interest is reached when we can say: “This man has written of himself.” G. Stanley Hall’s _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is an autobiography of which one feels a keen anxiety lest the many whom it can reward may somehow miss reading it. “I am far older than my years”--he is seventy-seven--“for I have laid aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations with which I started than most.” These simple and striking words define his attitude. The truly popular result of a work that has been undertaken and carried through in such a spirit ought to be emphasised. Dr. Hall is the author of important treatises on _Adolescence_ and _Senescence_, exhaustive in character and highly technical in their bearing; but I have yet to read anything of his which was not to a very large extent “popularly written” as well as scientifically valuable. Certainly his _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ deserves the wider audience. It begins on a New England farm with some chapters that reflect with ampleness and feeling and charm the life of New England in the 1850s; it continues through the various stages of an unusually rounded education; in its record of teaching and college executiveship the book constitutes a sort of history of the American college in the last half-century, and this is enlarged and given the value of ripened conclusions by a longer chapter near the close of the book.

There is also a tremendous chapter covering “Process in Psychology” and practically constituting a history of the science in Dr. Hall’s long lifetime--one might almost say since psychology was recognised as a science at all. But these points, while they demonstrate easily enough that the book is one no teacher or psychologist can afford to omit attending, do not make the case for the book as a sample of autobiography or as a work of popular interest. Then let some of the contents make it! Here is the report of an American who has known Mark Hopkins, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft, Treitschke, Wundt, Helmholtz, William James, Lord Kelvin, Jowett, Pasteur and many others; an American who can write of his boyhood with something of the charm of W. H. Hudson and much the same feeling for nature; who can write with frankness of the _vita sexualis_ in the New England of Emerson; who can--we fall back upon it--write!

A fellow-scientist of Dr. Hall’s though in quite another field has also written his autobiography, and the extraordinary circumstances of Michael Idvorsky Pupin’s life will be enough to attract popular attention to his _From Immigrant to Inventor_. Forty-eight years ago a Serbian boy who hadn’t a cent and who couldn’t speak a word of English landed in New York. Since 1901 this immigrant has been professor of electro-mechanics at Columbia University; he is the inventor of the Pupin coil, which, by reducing the necessary diameter of copper wire, has saved millions of dollars, and he also invented the device for tuning which many people use daily on radio sets. Michael Pupin was born at Idvor, Banat, Hungary, in a little community of Serbs rewarded for their services against the Turks by the gift of some land and political rights. In assessing his performance it must be borne in mind that he had the handicap of an utterly alien race and culture and speech to overcome in a far greater degree than Jacob A. Riis, who was Danish, or Edward Bok, who came from Holland. Pupin’s autobiography is of manifold interest; for one thing, he seems completely in sympathy with an American tradition which so many immigrants have never been able whole-heartedly to accept; for another, he traces the developments of electrical science by the bright thread of his interest and participation in them, and he does actually succeed in making some very difficult scientific achievements quite simple and beautifully plain.