E. G. Boring

At dinner with a group of undergraduates this spring, Edwin Garrigues Boring, Edgar Pierce Emeritus Professor of Psychology, was commenting with delight on the University's provision of special funds for professors emeritus. "That's so Harvardian," he exclaimed, but then checked himself: "Of course I'm not really a Harvard man; I've only been here since 1922." Despite being such a newcomer to Harvard, Boring guided the Department of Psychology for a generation, a distinction he shares only with William James. Beyond that, as author of two classics in psychology for a generation, a distinction he shares only with William James. Beyond that, as author of two classics in psychology, he created the historical self-consciousness which has become a part of psychologists all over the world.

In conversation, Boring keeps returning to two topics: "the great E. B. Titchener," the magnetic tyrant of psychology at Cornell early in this century; and the Zeitgeist, a concept he uses to explain his extraordinary personal influence in the history of Harvard psychology.

Boring went to Cornell in 1904 intending to major in mechanical engineering, and in fact received his M.E. in 1908. But his was not an orthodox program. To the profane astonishment of the professor of mechanical engineering, Boring chose English composition and psychology as two of his elective courses.

He is not now sure why, though he has some idea. At the Friends Select School in Philadelphia, he recalls, "in my day we had a class of four boys and eleven girls. We once started a football team, and I was put on left end. We then got beaten in our only game, after which we disbanded. I was not athletic and was terrified at being driven into something where I would be ridiculed. I remember paying a boy twenty-five cents to teach me to kick a football. It didn't work. When the girls took over, I fit in better. I was caught up in the lit-ry aspects of things. I helped found a journal, became interested in writing."

Boring's interest in psychology followed a general boyhood interest in science. He lived with a family of many relatives over his great-grandfather's drug store in Philadelphia. "There were lots of us in those three floors. I learned to read at home, since I went to school quite late. And I had very few friends my age; I played alone.

"I think all the scientific things came after I was nine. I remember being struck by the permanence of matter: on my fifth birthday I had a fire engine, but I lost the wheel under the cellar stairs; I found it four or five years later and actually put it back on.

"Somewhere along in here I began to get excited about magnets, and I remember discovering electric bells and batteries. With my allowance I bought a pound of wire, a battery and a bell--I guess I was fourteen. I made batteries with potassium dichromate dissolved in sulfuric acid. I had a little workshop in the storeroom. Once, to show the batteries, I carried them out on a tray and tripped; I spilled sulfuric acid all over the living room floor."

The first evidence of interest in psychology specifically came just after senior high school: "The girl I was fondest of said, 'Don't take psychology, it will make you morbid.' That probably had something to do with it."

Boring enrolled in Titchener's course in elementary psychology in the fall of 1905; the verve of Titchener's lecturing remained vivid five years later when, after working eighty-four hours a week for a year in a steel plant, Boring went back to Cornell. He intended to try for an A.M. in physics, so he could teach, but again got trapped into psychology--this time by earthworms, paramecia, and flatworms.

Titchener's influence and character Boring has detailed in his autobiography and in psychological journals; Titchener's persona effect was so great that, even now at age 76, when Boring wishes to support a point, he often does so with a quote from Titchener.

In 1922, Harvard and Stanford offered Boring jobs. Stanford promised a higher salary and a higher position. Boring chose Harvard. He began his career with a six-week hospitalization from an auto accident. He comments: "I have no proof that the accident did not make me brighter. Medical science lacks controls."

This psychologist's concern for controls made Boring uncomfortable at Harvard, for the psychologists were still in a department dominated by philosophers. The discomfort was also a challenge: Boring felt a "mission to rescue Harvard psychology from the philosophers." Though he eventually saved psychology from the philosophers by bisecting the department, he recalls that he never reformed the philosophers. "At the party celebrating the separation of the psychology and philosophy departments, I said, as usual, that psychology needs controls. Whitehead made a delightful little speech: 'They devote their lives to studying the human mind and still they don't trust it.'"

Again, when General Education in a Free Society was published at the end of World War II, Boring took the floor of the Faculty meeting to ask: "Where is your control? How do you know this thing will work?" He suggested that the College be divided in two, one half to receive Gen Ed courses, the other to go without. "Conant replied petulantly, 'You can't test it!' Who knows? He may have been right. But I wonder. At any rate, one interesting thing about the report was that it showed how far Harvard's prestige extended; my sister was teaching biology at Yenching University in Peiping and everyone out there became very excited about it."

On both of these occasions, while crying for controls, Boring was overseeing the creation of the present Department of Psychology. In 1934 he moved before the Faculty that the Department of Philosophy and Psychology be separated into two departments under one Division, and two years later he moved that divisions be abolished if the departments wished. The success of these motions Boring attributes to the Zeitgeist: "The Zeitgeist had this event up its sleeve all along. Thus I had another lesson as to how the free action of personal will in a naturalistic world is a delusion."

Boring was chairman of the Department for the first two years of its existence, and found himself again in that position in 1945 when the Department of Social Relations came into existence. Boring suggested that the Psychological Laboratory leave Emerson Hall for the Social Relations people and move into the laboratory S. S. Stevens had created in the basement of Memorial Hall. There Boring began to revise his 1929 History of Experimental Psychology, to work in "the paradox of the Zeitgeist which controls the Great Men and yet is controlled by them."

The concept of the Zeitgeist can be a great palliative to Boring, as well as explanation. "I don't think President Pusey understands what is going on in psychology, though Buck did and Bundy was wonderful about it. But Pusey has wanted very much to have this new building and has guided the Corporation to support it. So I don't share the bitterness and contempt I hear for the President. (Dr. Skinner is upset about the support of religion). Beebe-Center--a man who did the work of ten--used to say, 'Eliot is a University man, Lowell is a College man, Conant is a University man.' Doubtless he would say Pusey is a College man. This calms me down tremendously. Eliot was a scientist, Conant was a scientist, and the next President should be a scientist."

Boring finds the times have produced undergraduates enormously different from the kind he knew when he first came here. "The change came about in the forties, when there were enormous social changes. We faculty were scared about the GI Bill of Rights. But when the students flooded in, there was a sudden stiffening of intellectual interest; the gentleman's C became a thing of the past. But it's obvious it wasn't just the GI Bill of Rights; it has something to do with the population explosion.

"Now look at what we've got; it's respectable to be intellectually successful. This is something one just didn't see in the 1920's. It's more fun now talking to undergraduates--in fact, I like undergraduates now. How I used to suffer with Psychology 1 when people came to complain about grades."

The present academic selectivity at Harvard is good, Boring feels, because it has also changed the graduate students. "Not everybody can go through to the A.B., and certainly not to the Ph.D. Our graduate students are ever so much more highly selected, and this must be good." The only thing about selectivity Boring detests is the process of selection. "I hate the arrogance of the Faculty in assigning grades. If we could get rid of grades this might be fun." Then off into history: "I remember in the Department of Philosophy when we were making judgments about graduate students, Alfred North Whitehead and R. B. Perry were friends of the man in trouble. 'Oh, but he might be Aristotle,' they would say, 'oh, his wife's been ill.' I used to look at the bad record."

In addition to his classic History and the companion Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, Boring has written psychology texts, a research monograph on The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, a war manual (Psychology for the Fighting Man), articles on planaria, dementia precox, sensations in the alimentary canal, mental measurement, and the role of great men in the progress of science. Particularly famous papers dealt with the return of sensation in the arm after nerves have been cut, an experiment he performed on himself, and the "moon illusion"--the difference of the apparent size of the moon when it is on the horizon and when it is at the zenith. In all his writings, and in the many years he served as editor of the American Journal of Psychology and of Contemporary Psychology, he emphasized, by example and proscription, the importance of plain, sound English. It is a concern he passed on to the whole Department here.

In his spacious office in the basement of Memorial Hall, Boring now works regularly at the desk which used to belong to Hugo Munsterberg, the German psychologist whom James brought to Harvard in 1892. In the files along one wall are one hundred thousand letters from and to psychologists all over the world: "I'm just too lazy to throw them out," Boring says.

He is now editing a collection of his papers, and compiling a source book of readings in the history of psychology in collaboration with Richard Herrnstein, assistant professor of Psychology. But he is not in a rush; he enjoys a casual talk and a reminiscence. "I am too old to be in a hurry," he says, "for if there is one thing age teaches you about science, it is that there will always be someone to carry on, and that's very comforting."