In the following year Professor James withdrew from the experimental
work, and the conduct of the laboratory was given over to me. In the
years which followed, Dr. Arthur Pierce, Dr. J. E. Lough, and Dr.
Robert MacDougall were the assistants until three years ago, when the
development of the laboratory demanded a division of the assistant
functions; since that time Dr. E. B. Holt has been the assistant for
the work in human psychology, while Dr. R. M. Yerkes has had charge
of the work in comparative psychology. Since from the first I laid
special emphasis on research work, a greater number of small rooms
was soon needed. In the year 1893, we divided a part of the adjacent
lecture-room into four rooms for special investigations, and two years
later the larger of the two original rooms was divided into five. As
the lecture-room also was finally made part of the research laboratory,
we had at last eleven rooms in Dane Hall. The activities of the
laboratory, however, went far beyond the research work. We had regular
training-courses in experimental practice, and the lecture courses in
human and in comparative psychology drew largely on the resources of
our instrument cases. Yet the original investigations absorbed the
main energy of the laboratory, and demanded a steady expansion of
its apparatus. An illustrated catalogue of the instruments has been
published as part of the Harvard Exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair.
The participation of the students has been controlled by a principle
which has characterized our Harvard work through all these years,
and distinguished it from the methods of most other institutions. I
insist that no student shall engage in one investigation only, but
that every one who has charge of a special problem shall give to
it only half of his working time, while in the other half he is to
be subject in four, five, or more investigations by other members
of the laboratory. In this way each research is provided with the
desirable number of subjects, and all one-sidedness is avoided. Every
experimenter thus comes in contact with a large range of problems and
gets a fair training in manifold observations, besides the opportunity
for concentration on a special research. It is true that this demands
a complicated schedule and careful consideration of the special needs
of every research, but it gives to the work a certain freshness and
vividness, and banishes entirely the depression which is unavoidable
whenever a student is for any length of time a passive subject in one
psychological enquiry only. In both capacities, as experimenter and
as observing subject, only graduate students have been acceptable. In
this way about _one hundred investigations_ on human psychology have
been carried on, for most of which I have proposed the problems and
the special lines of work, taking care that the research of succeeding
years and of succeeding generations of graduate students should show
a certain internal continuity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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