My remarks on that occasion may thus serve as the most direct introduction to our work. They are printed here, together with a short sketch of the equipment of the laboratory. I venture to add also two other papers, one of which points to the administrative, the other and longer one to the philosophical background of Emerson Hall. Inasmuch as I was Chairman of the Philosophical Department throughout the five years in which the plan for Emerson Hall was growing and became finally realized, it has been my official duty repeatedly to express our hopes and ideals. Thus I had to formulate the wishes of the Department at the outset in a letter to the Visiting Committee, a letter which was used as a circular in asking the public for funds. Two years later when Harvard celebrated the Emerson anniversary, I delivered an address on Emerson as philosopher. This epistemological paper may seem far removed from the interests of the Harvard Psychological Studies, and yet I am glad to print it in this laboratory volume, and thus emphatically to indicate that I for one consider philosophy the true basis for the psychologist. There follow thus, first, the letter to the Visiting Committee, with which the Emerson Hall movement took its official inception in 1901; secondly, the address delivered at Harvard on the celebration of the Emerson anniversary in May, 1903; thirdly, the paper contributed to the debate of the philosophers at the opening meeting in December, 1905; and, finally, a description of the present status of the laboratory in January, 1906. II. THE NEED FOR EMERSON HALL [The letter addressed to the Visiting Committee of the Overseers of Harvard University, in 1901, reads as follows:]