on the threads of our philosophical discussions. I opened my little laboratory again, and again had students from many lands. And yet the old time did not come back; everything had changed because I myself was no longer the same. A new problem had entered into my life-the problem America. It was only natural that now everybody talked with me about. America, that inquiries concerning America came from all quarters near and far, and everywhere I found a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of American life which made me restless and forced on me the feeling that I had no right to consider my American experience a closed episode. Moreover, despite all my interest and enthusiasm for the New World, I had not failed to recognize defects and mistakes and illusions. After my return to Germany I became more earnestly aware of the great service which the two peoples could render each other. I had recognized the idealistic undercurrent of American life, but it was an individualis tic idealism. I became aware that the greatest failures and deficiencies of American civilization resulted from a lack of that social idealism which gave meaning to German life. If I could carry the message of German ideals to America and of American ideals to Germany, it would be a life-task which would not interfere in any way with my professional calling as scholar and teacher, but which would give to it a deeper and wider significance. This sentiment grew in me from day to day.

Of course this feeling would have quickly burned out if my Harvard place had been taken by a successor. But long before I left the university had urged me to stay, and when I declined, had asked me to postpone the final decision for two years. The professorship of psychology and the directorship of the psychological laboratory were to be kept open for me, I was to remain in the Harvard system in the capacity of distant adviser, and only when two years had gone was I to settle my life problem. Surely, if only my academic work had been concerned I should

have remained in my natural German background. But the new cultural task had stirred me, and for more than a year I hesitated and wavered. This time it meant to burn my bridges behind me; I should have to give up my German professorship, and not a few misgivings burdened my heart. Would my young children, born on Black Forest soil, find a happy childhood in foreign surroundings? Could I be sure that the cordial friendship shown to the German guest would never suffer from political vicissitudes? But the inner voice was stronger than the warning of skeptical friends. In the second summer I promised to return, and in the fall of 1897 we crossed the ocean again, this time with all our furniture and with my whole library, as we could not foresee whether we should stay five years or even ten years in a foreign land.

The old philosopher says, "You never swim twice in the same stream." Cambridge, too, was not the same to me, as my whole life now took a different turn. In those first years I had only tried to observe and to understand my surroundings; my new aim was to influence them. However much I had moved about on my trial trip, I had not dared to make public speeches, and I had never ventured English writing. I knew a little of the American world, but the American world did not know anything about me. It was a happy time when even the reporters had not discovered me. I think I did not neglect my academic work. My psychology classes grew larger and larger, my laboratory was crowded with graduate students who came for psychological research, and in my scientific writing from now on I alternated almost rhythmically between German and English books. Only once, in what I consider my chief philosophical work, "The Eternal Values," did I present the same book to German and English readers. Another book, "Psychology and Industrial Efficiency," was in its English garb almost the same as the German volume. But four other German books I did not translate into English, and seven English ones I did not

Traits," marginal notes to the text of American life as I read it. I was frankly critical, but in my mind it was balanced by the sympathy and enthusiasm which I poured into my next larger work, written for German consumption. In two big volumes I tried to draw the picture of "The Americans" in the German language for my friends at home. Probably no book of mine has been so much dis

But the printed story was only the reflection of my practical moves on the chess-board of international affairs. The

first step needed, it seemed to me, was a fuller contact of Germany with the culturally higher layer of the American people. The German nation had no channels of connection with the best elements of Americanism. Germany relied on that superficial contact between the two gov

ernments. But while it is an essential feature of the organization of the German empire that the political and governmental and intellectual and cultural threads are completely intertwined, it was at the end of the last century no less characteristic of America that politics and government were widely separated from the intellectually and culturally strongest parts of the people. I knew that a change of ideas in Germany could arise most quickly and most helpfully if it was initiated by the Government, and I knew that the American sympathy could be won only if the movement was at first kept as far as possible from mere politics. The leading universities, with their reserve force of alumni, seemed to me the ideal startingpoint. In the summer of 1898 I developed my plans to the German ambassador in Washington, Baron von Holleben, who entered into them enthusiastically. From those days to his death three years ago our friendly relations were never interrupted. I have probably never exchanged so many letters in my life with any other man except my brothers. The first step was his coming for a week as my guest to Cambridge. He met in my house the leading university people, and was then officially received through a week of festivities by the president of the university, by the governor, and by many student bodies.

The effect in Germany was the expected one: the illustrated papers brought out pictures of American universities, and the newspapers suddenly discovered American intellectual life. Even the academic circles had up to that time not the slightest idea of it. I remember in the week when Professor von Holst and I were called to Chicago and to Harvard I was asked ever so often which of the two universities was the older one, at a time when Harvard was two and a half centuries and Chicago two and a half months old. As soon as the Holleben episode at Cambridge was closed I went to Chicago and convinced President Harper, the most active of all university heads, that after Germany's official contact with the leading university of the East the leading univer

sity of the West ought to follow. Chicago carried out the suggestion in the most brilliant style. A holiday was arranged for all departments of the university; in the academic theater the president and leading professors made speeches on the cultural community of Germany and the United States, and the German ambassador answered with an oration which was printed and widely distributed. Other academic institutions followed in line. Soon Harvard gave an honorary degree to the ambassador, and now the ice was broken, and a period of cordial relations between the leading circles of Germany and America began. The thanks of the emperor for the honors conferred on his representative were a splendid gift of casts of German sculpture and architecture for the Germanic Museum in Harvard. The emperor's brother was to bring the message. In the meantime a Harvard man had become president and united the highest culture with the highest office. He entered whole-heartedly into the new movement. On the sixth of March, in 1902, under my roof Prince Henry of Prussia officially gave the documents and the pictures of the imperial gift to the president of Harvard University. It was a fascinating gathering which had assembled in my library, in which I am writing. The official Americans were led by David J. Hill, the later ambassador to Germany; towering over the German group stood one of the mildest-looking men, Admiral von Tirpitz, and next to him his American colleague, Admiral "Bob" Evans; and many other Americans and Germans widely known in the world listened to the exchange of speeches, culminating in Prince Henry's spontaneous last appeal that the friendship between America and Germany never be interrupted.

Now it was no longer difficult to build new bridges, the more as thereafter I found at all times support and welcome both at the White House in Washington and at the imperial palace in Potsdam. In the following year I went over to Germany in the name of the St. Louis World's Fair to invite the leading schol

ars personally to the great Congress of Arts and Sciences. Nothing could demonstrate the new order of things more clearly than that two thirds of those mighty men

My own daily life had long since taken another character. There was seldom a week without some banquet speech in Boston or New York or elsewhere, and the

public addresses

became my pastime.

Above

to whom I brought invitations accepted, and appeared in the following summer at the shores of the Mississippi. Numberless ties were formed, and the much disputed professorial exchange was more or less directly the outcome of this expedition.

world. Twenty years ago, when I moved into my house, that part of Cambridge was one large garden. Since that time slowly man and moth have destroyed the beautiful elms,

and the apartment - houses have encroached upon us. Yet I feel as if I could not leave my Ware Street home: too many men of genius, world famous message-bearers, have stepped over its threshold and hallowed it.

Only once was I at the point of leaving the American field of work.

At the beginning of the century the University of Königsberg called me. It was near to my beloved Dantzic home, and it was the chair of the great Immanuel Kant; that fascinated me, and I cabled that I should probably accept. But then Josiah

Royce sat with me a long Sunday morning and insisted that it was my higher duty to stand by my Harvard post. Others might fill that German chair, he said, but here I was needed for more than the mere professional work. The philosopher must not be a patriot only, but at the same time a citizen of the spiritual world in all lands, and I should be among true friends here my life long. That night I sent a second cable declining the call. In future I hardly hesitated when universities in Germany and without approached me. In 1908 the Prussian Government, aware that I looked on the interpretation of America as a part of my life-work, asked whether I would accept a full professorship for American civilization to be created for me at the University of Berlin. But I declined again; my American work was not completed. With the greatest satisfaction, on the other hand, I did agree to the Harvard proposal that I go to the University of Berlin as Harvard exchange professor. This function had always been a half-year task, but in my case the German Government asked that I be sent for a full year. Harvard consented, and I remained from June, 1910, to August, 1911, with my family in Berlin. From the day when I gave my opening address on the ties between Germany and America in the wonderful new aula, in the presence of the emperor and all official Berlin, to the day when I delivered my farewell address in the classical and truly sacred old aula of the great alma mater, it was the crowning year of my life.

One feature of the exchange year gave me special delight. For a long time it had been a pet idea of mine that the cultural relations of the peoples ought not to be left to chaotic chance influences, but ought to be furthered by planful organization. International clearing-houses ought to be established for science and scholarship, for technic and exploration, for literature and art, for education and social reform, and all the other elements of national activities outside of politics and commerce. I dreamed of such cultural centers of organization in every capital until their net

work should span the globe. An institute in Berlin, with the task of organizing and aiding the to-and-fro movements between the United States and Germany, seemed to me the most desirable beginning. Hence in 1907 I had submitted to the Berlin authorities the plan for an Amerika-Institut, which might be slowly enlarged toward a general foreign institute. The exchange year at last brought the chance. for realizing this dream. German and German-American bankers had provided ample funds, the Government offered a suite of seven rooms in the new palace of the Royal Library, and in September, 1910, I began with a staff of ten persons my fascinating work as official first director of the Amerika-Institut. It was not an easy parting when I returned a year later to my routine existence in Boston.

The American daily work, too, had in the meantime expanded in new directions. In my early Harvard years my experimental psychological labors had been devoted to strictly theoretical interests. But with the beginning of the century the time seemed ripe for applying the new science to the practical affairs of life. Efforts of that kind began everywhere, and I felt that this was the next great task for our laboratories. I began to give increasing attention to the application of psychology to education, to medicine, to law, to vocational guidance, to commerce, to industry. This, too, brought me into much livelier contact with the wide world than the earlier studies. I had to visit court-rooms and factories, schools and hospitals, and I was sometimes four and six and eight nights in the sleeper in order to study a significant case. But this group of activities demands the coöperation of the community. The teachers and lawyers, the physicians and manufacturers, yes, the thinking public at large, must begin to psychologize if such work is to advance. Hence I tried to do my share in popularizing psychology by lectures, essays, and books which were widely read. All this brought me from year to year more into touch with all layers of the nation. I moved among teachers and scholars, among