Edwin Boring: Psychology

“It is not likely that the history of psychology can be written in the next three centuries without mention of Freud's name and still claim to be a general history of psychology… Perhaps, had Freud been smothered in his cradle, the times would have produced a substitute, It is hard to say. The dynamics of history lack control experiments.”

Edwin Boring

Cited in: Eric Shiraev (2010) A History of Psychology: A Global Perspective. p. 314
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

History , Time

“Psychologically attention is drainage, whatever it may be physiologically.”

Edwin Boring

p, 642
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

“[William James, in the 1890s] began that metamorphosis of German psychology which was to alter the Teutonic worm of sensory content into the American butterfly of functional reality.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 740; As cited in: John Nisbet, "How it all began: educational research 1880-1930." Scottish Educational Review 31 (1999): 3-9.

Reality

“Introspectionism got its ism because the protesting new schools needed a clear and stable contrasting background against which to exhibit their novel features. No proponent of introspection a the basic method of psychology ever called himself an introspectionist.”

Edwin Boring

Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 172 ; Cited in: Kurt Danziger, "The history of introspection reconsidered." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.3 (1980): 241-262.

School

“Fechner laid down the general outlines of his program [psychophysics] in ZendAvesta, the book about heaven and the future life. Imagine sending a graduate student of psychology nowadays to the Divinity School for a course in immortality as preparation for advanced experimental work in psychophysics! How narrow we have become!”

Edwin Boring

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 128: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;254)

Life , Books , School , Imagination

“I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain. That time is still a long way off, and in the interval I choose to sit cozily with my robot, squeezing his hand and feeling a thrill -- a scientist's thrill -- when he squeezes mine back again.”

Edwin Boring

Edwin Boring (1946). Mind and mechanism; Cited in: Melford E. Spiro (1992) Anthropological Other Or Burmese Brother?: Studies in Cultural Analysis.. p. 68

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Time

“American psychology inherited its physical body from German experimentalism, but it got its mind from Darwin.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 494

“The experimental psychologist… needs historical sophistication within his own sphere of expertness. Without such knowledge he sees the present in distorted perspective, he mistakes old facts and old views for new, and he remains unable to evaluate the significance of new movements and methods. In this matter I can hardly state my faith too strongly. A psychological sophistication that contains no component of historical orientation seems to me to be no sophistication at all.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. ix; As cited in: Baldwin R. Hergenhahn (2008). An Introduction to the History of Psychology. p. 5

Faith , Knowledge