In 1885 he became Instructor in French and German at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He translated Théodule-Armand Ribot's "German Psychology of Today" and wrote his first paper "The Postulates of a Physiological Psychology". Ribot's work traced the origins of psychology from Kant through Herbart, Fechner, Lotze to Wundt.
In 1887,while working as a professor of philosophy at Lake Forest College he married Helen Hayes Green, the daughter of the President of the Seminary. At Lake Forest he published the first part of his "Handbook of Psychology (Senses and Intellect)" in which he directed the attention to the new experimental psychology of Weber, Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt.
In 1889 he went to the University of Toronto as the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics. His creation of a laboratory of experimental psychology at Toronto (a first in North America) coincided with the birth of his daughters Helen (1889) and Elisabeth (1891) which inspired the quantitative and experimental research on infant development that was to make such a vivid impression on Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg through Baldwin's "Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes" (1894) dedicated to the subject. A second part of "Handbook of Psychology (Feeling and Will)" appeared in 1891.
Baldwin complemented his psychological work with philosophy, in particular epistemology his contribution to which he presented in the presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1897. By then the work on the "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology" (1902) had been announced and a period of intense philosophical correspondence ensued with the contributors to the project: William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Edward Moore, Bernard Bosanquet, James McKeen Cattell, Edward B. Titchener, Hugo Münsterberg, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Adolf Meyer, George Stout, Franklin Henry Giddings, Edward Bagnall Poulton and others.
An important contributor should not be overlooked. Conway Lloyd Morgan was perhaps closest to understanding the so called "Baldwin Effect". In his "Habit and Instinct" (1896) he phrased a comparable version of the theory, like he did in an address to a session of the New York Academy of Sciences (February 1896) in the presence of Baldwin. (1896/Of modification and variation. Science 4(99) (November 20):733-739). As did Henry Fairfield Osborn (1896/A mode of evolution requiring neither natural selection nor the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Transactions of the New York Academy of Science 15:141-148). The "Baldwin Effect", building in part on the principle of "organic selection" proposed by Baldwin in "Mental Development" did only receive its name by George Gaylord Simpson in 1953. (in: Evolution 7:110-117) (see:Daniel J. Depew in "Evolution and Learning" M.I.T.2003)
In 1899 Baldwin went to Oxford to supervise the completion of the "Dictionary..." (1902). He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science at the Oxford University. (In the light of the foregoing the deafning silence with which J.M.Baldwin was later treated in Oxford publications on the Mind may well come to be regarded as one of the significant omissions in the history of ideas for the 20th century. Compare for example Richard Gregory:"The Oxford Companion to the Mind" first edition 1987)
In Baltimore Baldwin started to work on "Thoughts and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought. Or Genetic Logic" (1906) a densely integrative rendering of his ideas culminating in "Genetic Theory of Reality. Being the Outcome of Genetic Logic as Issuing in the Aesthetic Theory of Reality called Pancalism" (1915).
In Baltimore also Baldwin was arrested in a raid on a brothel (1908), a scandal that put an end to his American career. Forced to leave Johns Hopkins he looked for residence in Paris. He was to reside in France till his death in 1934.
His first years (1908-1912) in France were interrupted by long stays in Mexico where he advised on university matters and lectured at the School of Higher Studies at the National University in Mexico City. His " Darwin and the Humanities" (1909) and "Individual and Society" (1911) date from this period. In 1912 he took permanent residence in Paris.
Baldwin's residence in France resulted in his pointing out the urgency of American non-neutral support for his new hosts on the French battlefields of World War I. He published "American Neutrality, Its Cause and Cure" (1916) for the purpose, and when in 1916 he survived a German torpedo attack on the "Sussex" in the English channel- on the return trip from a visit to William Osler at Oxford- his open telegram to the President of the United States on the affair became frontpage news (New York Times). With the entry of America in the war (1917) he helped to organize the Paris branch of the American Navy League, acting as its Chairman till 1922. In 1926 his memoirs "Between Two Wars (1861-1921)" were published. He died in Paris on 9 November 1934.
At the proceedings a lecture was held by Henri Delacroix: "Maine de Biran et l'école Medico-psychologique". The paper highlights the work of Maine de Biran for medical psychology prompted by Antoine Royer-Collard (not to be confused with his brother Pierre Royer-Collard), who headed the mental asylum of Charenton and had asked de Biran to look into the curriculum for mental pathology at the "École Medicale" (1819). (i.e. "Considerations sur les principes d'une division des faits psychologiques et physiologiques" in vol. XV, Tisserand ed)
Maine de Biran had always been acutely aware of the dynamogenic origin of "aperception" in consciousness. In his own words:
In "History of psychology: A scetch and an interpretation" (1913) Baldwin analysed the significance of Maine de Biran as follows:
Attention to the extent of this topic is justified by contemporary studies of consciousness criticizing Descartes (Antonio Damasio) or reapraising Condillac (Merlin Donald) without reference to the pioneering efforts of Maine de Biran in constructively criticizing both within the framework of mental development. What "further analysis of habit on the functional side" meant for Baldwin is currently being debated. (see:Terence Deacon, 1997)
His contributions to the young discipline's early journals and institutions were highly significant as well. Baldwin was a co-founder (with James McKeen Cattell) of Psychological Review (which was founded explicitly to compete with G. Stanley Hall's American Journal of Psychology), Psychological Monographs and Psychological Index. He was also the founding editor of Psychological Bulletin.
In 1892 he was vice-president of the International Congress of Psychology held in London, and in 1897–1898 president of the American Psychological Association; he received a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Denmark (1897), and was honorary president of the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Geneva in 1896.
In further stages of development - the ones most critical to an understanding of the evolution of mind- this was graphically (par excellence !) illustrated in the child's efforts to draw and learning to write. ("Mental Development in the Child and the Race").
In later editions of "Mental Development" Baldwin changed the term "organic selection" into "functional selection".
It is the communication of this profound insight into the practice related nature of dynamogenic development, above all its integration as a creative factor in the fabric of society, that helped the students of Baldwin to understand what was left of Lamarck's signature. Singularly illustrated by Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature (1979) and brilliantly reintegrated in contemporary studies by Terence Deacon The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain (1997).
In human species the faculty of niche building is favoured by a practical intelligence able to design the circumstances that will put its vital acquirements out of harms way in terms of (lineary predicted) natural selection. It is precisely in the fields of study relating to massive selection pressures against which other species seem to be without defences -biological development in the face of novel pandemics (AIDS, mad cow disease)- that the arguments relative to the natural heredity of intelligent acquirements have resurfaced in a way most challengeing to science.
For example, the incest taboo, if powerfully enforced, removes the natural selection pressure against the possession of incest-favoring genes. After a few generations without this natural selection pressure, unless such genetic material were profoundly fixed in the genome, it would tend to diversify and lose its function. Humans would no longer be innately averse to incest, but would rely on their capacity to internalize such rules from cultural practices.
The opposite case can also be true: cultural practice might selectively breed humans to meet the fitness conditions of new environments, cultural and physical, which earlier hominids could not have survived. Baldwinian evolution might strengthen or weaken a genetic trait.
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