the world; my parents had been great travelers, and I had inherited their pleasure in foreign vistas. There was little to lose and much to gain if we tried such a change of cultural climate for a few vacation years.

One thing helped to overcome the skepticism of our friends. In the same week in which I was asked to go to Harvard, Professor von Holst was called to the newly founded University of Chicago, and accepted. If a former rector found it worth while, the youngest instructor might risk it. I went to Karlsruhe, the seat of the Baden Government. As universities are state matters in Germany, it did not concern Berlin at all. I suppose that in the Prussian or in the imperial German Government no one knew at that time of my existence. Hence those who discovered later that it was the kaiser who sent me over the ocean went slightly astray. The Baden minister of education simply smiled, gave me leave of absence for three years, and told me, with a jolly side glance, that he trusted I would have some queer experiences. A few weeks later William James himself came with his family to Europe on a sabbatical year. Freiburg was one of his first stations, and from there he and I together undertook an unforgetable trip into Switzerland. In those wanderings around Lake Lucerne we became truly friends, and for the first time the real America appeared upon my horizon.

In August, 1892, my wife and I left Hamburg for the great adventure. Our household goods, of course, were stored at home. We wanted to be free for our lark. At last I had a week to learn a little English, as everybody on deck felt obliged to draw me into conversation in order to explain to me the superiorities of the New World. But I still see before me the cordial face of an elderly Western lawyer who had silently listened for hours to that smoking-room talk about skyscrapers and ice-cream and Pullman cars and Christian Science and yachts and shoes and what not. When the others had gone he quietly said:

came on board some hours before we reached Sandy Hook brought papers with the news that for five days the cholera had devastated Hamburg, where I had left many friends. My life long I have been a slave of mail and newspapers, and have felt nervous whenever I could not be reached for half a day. It shocked me deeply that I had not known for almost a week about the disaster at home, and I made up my mind that ocean travel was, after all, not the thing for me. I did not foresee how soon the daily afternoon paper, with the wireless news of the hour, would be a matter-of-course feature of our voyages. I felt only that I ought not to have separated myself so far from the afflicted fatherland, and ought not to have ventured such a long interruption of my normal life. Never again! And while my mind was longing for home the majestic ship moved in the darkness of the evening past the Statue of Liberty to its berth in Hoboken. It was nearly midnight when the carriage stopped at the old Plaza Hotel, in which rooms had been reserved. Half an hour later I knew all about American ice-water. One hour later I gave up my efforts to open American windows, as they turned neither outward nor inward; and two hours later I stood before another puzzle: in the room for our maid there was no bed, but a big standing box with a mirror, and no one of us was able to discover the secret of an American folding-bed. I felt dimly that I had still much to learn, and it was nearly morning when I found rest for the first time in the New World and for the first time at the dizzy height of a seventh story.

After a few days in New York unrest overcame us; we wanted to reach our real goal. On the last day of August we took the morning train to Boston, and when we arrived, there stood waiting for us on the platform a little man with a queer, large, homely, and yet wonderful head. I felt as if Socrates stood before me. It was Professor Josiah Royce, the deepest thinker in America. To be sure, deep thought in logical research does not guarantee deep insight into the qualities of furnished apartments. The quarters which he had rented for us in Cambridge were impossible, and so Royce and I began visiting all the available furnished houses. in the neighborhood of Harvard University. He was preparing himself just at that time for a new course on German idealism and was anxious to talk it over fully with his new German colleague. And so the beginning of my Harvard life was a full week's discussion of parlor furniture and Schopenhauer, furnaces and Fichte, bath-rooms and Hegel, all intimately intertwined. And when it was over, Royce had for all time settled in my heart, and I had settled at least for a year in the old-fashioned house of a true New England minister.

The spirit of this house was new to me. My wife and I were accustomed to surroundings which were esthetically tuned in color and warmth. In our new home the surroundings looked severe and colorless and cool; and yet the old colonial furniture, the religious and historical books and pictures, the somewhat austere, but genial, rooms, blended into a charming harmony which cast on me a new spell. I felt a life element which had not touched me before; I felt the New England Puritanism and its ethical power. I began to read about the American past and to grasp the meaning of the Puritan conscience for the molding and casting of American life. A few days later I sat face to face with the most striking Puritan figure of the time, with Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot.

Never shall we forget that wholehearted, warm cordiality with which the

town.

leading university families received us into their circle when a few weeks later the college opened and people streamed to That period at the beginning of the nineties was perhaps the time at which the wave of American interest in German scholarship had reached its height. Twenty years before there were hardly any graduate schools in America, and hence little need for the characteristic contribution of the German universities. On the other hand, twenty years later the American faculties were filled with young instructors who had received their highest academic training in the new American graduate departments, and who therefore did not feel in any contact with the German work. But between the two periods, just at the time when I came, the conditions were most favorable for the feeling of German influence. The graduate schools had come to their own, but their teachers were mostly men who had received their strongest intellectual impulses in the halls. of German universities, and had come back to foster the spirit of belief in German scholarly methods. I was the first in an American university who had actually been a professor in a German university. The welcome from my Harvard colleagues and, far beyond their circle, from the intellectuals of Boston surely made us forget at once all that we had heard on the ship about the social coldness of Boston and Cambridge. The fact of my being far the youngest full professor in the Harvard faculty-room, however, had the curious effect that we were received into a generation much older than ourselves. So it happens that most of those whose hospitality gave us the first true contact with America have long since departed. Goodwin, the Greek scholar, who loved nothing better than to talk of his old German university days; Bowditch, the leader of the physiologists, the favorite pupil of his great teacher Ludwig in Leipsic; Everett, the philosopher, who had translated Fichte; Lane, the Latinist; Paine, the professor of music; Winsor, the librarian; Agassiz, the famous biologist; Wright, the philologist ; J. M. Pierce,

logians like Toy, Peabody, Lyon, and Emerton, and not a few others, contributed much by their welcome to the intellectual vividness of those early years. But however stimulating and inspiring this contact on the level of scholarship was, and however much it kept alive the traditions of scholarly pursuit to which I was accustomed at home, its most significant trait, after all, was not the academic aspect, but the Puritanic one. The chaste spirit of that old New England house in which I spent my days seemed to fill the whole town and to bring to me daily a message of the old, stern New England

past.

I remember as if it were yesterday our first Cambridge party. At the threshold of the new academic year Professor Norton and his family had invited some scores of friends to greet the new professors; it had been heralded to us as the chief festival event of the Cambridge season. The quaint, dignified home on the hill was dimly illumined by the mellow light of a few shaded lamps. All talking was in the half-tones of subdued voices; and toned down like the light and the sound was the suggestion of nourishment. There was some coffee and some lemonade, a few tiny brown-bread sandwiches, and, I think, some ice-cream. I had not dined at home that night in the expectation of the glorious feast, with an abundance of courses and wines as at such evening parties in Germany; and yet when we drove home from Shady Hill my wife and I felt a joy and satisfaction such as few parties had ever given us before. We felt as if we had entered a truly spiritual community where the demand for high thinking and plain living was the life instinct. Where was that shallow and gaudy America, that vulgar and trivial America, that corrupt and self-seeking America, that noisy and sensational America, of which all Europe was talking? Had no one ever discovered the true soul of the American people? A few days later we spent one of those wonderful Indian summer days at the Boxford farm of the Palmers. In the biography of his wife, truly a per

fect gem of artistic biography writing, George Herbert Palmer says about the place that it "possessed in Mrs. Palmer's affections a sacredness no other spot of earth could claim. Into it had soaked the traditions of my family for eight generations, her own early nature worship had been transferred, and here became newly enriched by many hallowed experiences. . . . Our farm in Boxford has never been owned by anybody but ourselves and the Indians."

many

It was a New England day among trees along the brook, in the carryall, and on the piazza, a day spent in serenity and enjoyment of nature; but all the time we felt those eight generations of New England people filled with the spirit of sturdy righteousness. In those early days I threw off the superficial prejudices with. which I, like every educated European, had been stuffed. I began to grasp the deep idealistic undercurrent of American life. It is a psychological commonplace that we mostly perceive only what we expect and disregard those traits of our surrounding for which we are not prepared. Later on I came into many more millionaires' palaces than ministers' homes, into more new-fashioned sky-scrapers than old-fashioned farm-houses, and it may be that if my American experience had started with months in the showplaces of luxury and enterprise, my mind would have been remolded differently and would have become blind and deaf, like that of many a visitor, to the idealistic side of American life. But as I formed my first ideas of the moving powers in the New World in the peace of old Cambridge, my mind became sensitized for those better and finer elements in the life which surrounded me. I recognized the idealistic energies even where they seemed suppressed by the turmoil, I heard the voice of the Pilgrim fathers through the noise of the market, and through the glamour of a selfish time I saw them in their "trembling walk with God." The whole of American history shaped itself. in my mind more and more as influenced by the idealistic energies of New Eng

land. When a year later the greatest German scholar of the century, Helmholtz, was my guest, I tried to show him the scientific institutes, took him to see Harvard's famous glass flowers, and led him from laboratory to laboratory; but when we sat quietly in my study, I poured out my heart. I told him that he must not think that he had seen the true America. I told him that America is not a place to be seen, and that it can be understood only by entering with sympathy into the deeper invisible powers at the bottom of the national soul; I spoke of the America which I had found. He leaned back for a long while, then he looked at me with. his marvelous great eyes, and said quietly: "You have a great task before you if you really want to reach the mind of Europe with that message."

Of course I knew that I had to visit more than Boston and its neighborhood if I was truly to understand the New World. I soon began to travel and to see for myself. Before a year had passed my wife and I had passed over the Niagara ice-bridge in winter-time and strolled through the Adirondacks in summer days, we had stayed in the great cities of the East, and spent a bewildering week at the Chicago World's Fair. There it happened that on a single day I became acquainted with three men who were to exert deep influence on my years to come. I had there my first talk with Carl Schurz, and met through him Baron Holleben, the German minister, later ambassador from Germany; and a few hours afterward, when I came to the scientific exhibits of the Prussian Government in the educational building of the World's Fair, I was led through its treasures by Frederick Schmidt, the young representative of the Berlin ministry of education, to-day the far-sighted director in the Kultusministerium. The following winter I undertook my first trip to the Pacific, well equipped with numberless introductions to the leading men in the universities and institutions on the way. I was for some days the guest of the chancellor of Kansas University, saw Nebraska and Colorado,

was shown Leland Stanford in its first days by President Jordan, saw San Francisco and Los Angeles. I traveled north, I traveled south, I plunged into the great life of New York and Philadelphia and Washington. And when the three years of my Freiburg leave of absence approached their end, I felt with a good conscience that I had really seen something of the American land and of the American people, and that I had grasped their inner meaning a little better than those tourists. who had supplied the continent with supercilious judgments about the outside of the American house.

Yet all the time the center of my work was my work. I loved it with all my heart. I had a well-equipped laboratory and eager, enthusiastic students. To be sure, I did not risk lecturing in the first year, but with the second winter I was no longer afraid to clothe psychology in the badly fitting garment of my poor English. My students in the laboratory whom I had the first year in actual research did not mind it from the beginning; on the contrary, they soon began unconsciously to imitate some of my Germanisms. But the lecture audiences, too, were patient, and in the third year I lectured on the whole as fluently in English as in German. My students and I published a number of investigations. But my daily writing at home was on a big work, "The Foundations of Psychology," in the German language. After all, I knew that these three beautiful American years were only an excursion. My life-work would lie in the German university, German scholars would be my public, and so I toiled on the book of my hope in order to show to my colleagues when I went home that I had not wasted those years of my journey. In May, 1895, we gave our farewell reception, and a few days later we sailed home.

In the autumn of 1895 we moved again into our old Freiburg residence, with its beautiful vista of the somber mountains. I wandered again with my old friend. Heinrich Rickert upon the familiar paths of the Black Forest, and he and I spun