JAMES MARK BALDWIN (1861-1964)

American

psychologist. A year before Baldwin was born, his parents

had moved from Connecticut to Columbia, South

Carolina, where his father became involved with the

Reconstruction administration after the Civil War. Following

an undergraduate education at Princeton, Baldwin

spent a year in Germany, where he studied with

Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and the philosopher Friedrich

Paulsen in Berlin. Baldwin then returned to

Princeton where from 1885 to 1887 he completed his

doctoral work with the president of the college, the

Scottish philosopher and Presbyterian minister James

McCosh. At Princeton he attended courses in the Divinity

School before committing himself to philosophy

and psychology. After finishing his dissertation, Baldwin

taught philosophy and psychology at Lake Forest

IJniversity in Illinois. a Presbyterian college, for 2 years

(1887-1889). In 1889, he was appointed to the Chair

of Metaphysics and Logic at the University of Toronto,

where he founded a laboratory. In 1893, he was appointed

to the Stuart Chair in Psychology at Princeton

IJniversity, where he founded his second laboratory. In

1894, he and James McKeen Cattell founded and subsequently

coedited the Psychological Review and the adjunct

journals Psychological Index and Psychological

Monographs. In 1897, Baldwin served as president of

the American Psychological Association. In 1903, he

was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Psychology

and Chair of the Psychology Department at Johns Hopkins

University. There he reestablished the laboratory

founded earlier by G. Stanley Hall and founded the Psychological

Bulletin. Because of a scandal, he left Johns

Hopkins in 1908. For the next few years he was associated

with the National University of Mexico in Mexico

City, where he aided the organization of the faculties

of philosophy and the social sciences. From 1913 until

his death in 1934, he was professor at L’Ecole des Hautes

Etudes Sociales in Paris.

The early career of James Mark Baldwin was typical

of many first-generation psychologists in the United

States. As a result of his visit to Wilhelm Wundt’s psychological

laboratory in the fall of 1884, Baldwin became

enthusiastic about the possibilities the new psychology

offered for answering primarily philosophical

questions. After completing his philosophy degree at

Princeton, his founding of three psychological laboratories

in North America provided a significant impulse

to the institutionalization of experimental psychology.

Nevertheless, his interest in experimentation decreased

when, in the 1880s, he became involved in developmental

psychology, for which Wundtian experimental

practices were largely irrelevant. Baldwin’s developmental

psychology was strongly influenced by his adherence

to a functionalist psychology based on his interpretation

of Darwin’s evolutionary theories. As well

as introducing evolutionary ideas to psychology, Baldwin

contributed his conception of organic evolution to

evolutionary biology, later to be called the Baldwineffect,

by proposing a mechanism that explained how

characteristics acquired through individual learning

could be inherited by the species without resorting to

Lamarckian arguments.

Before 1889, Baldwin’s work can best be characterized

as mental philosophy. After that date, Baldwin became

an evolutionary psychologist. Inspired by Darwin’s

evolutionary theories and Herbert Spencer’s

writings, he emphasized the need for a functional instead

of a faculty psychology focusing on development

rather than intuition and introspection. As a consequence,

he broke with Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B.

Titchener’s structuralist psychology. In his works on developmental

psychology, Baldwin attempted to integrate

Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Hegel’s philosophy.

In Baldwin’s view, the development of the child’s

mind is closely related to the evolution of humankind

as well as to the evolution of the species. Baldwin

(1895) discerned a prelogical phase (based on imagination

and memory), a logical phase (based on reasoning;

concurrent with language acquisition), and a hyperlogical

phase (based on flexible processes of problem

solving transcending syllogistic reasoning) in the development

of the child’s mind. Baldwin (1897) provided

a complementary overview of the social development

of the child’s personality. The child passes through a

projective stage (in which the child recognizes the differences

between people and inanimate objects): a subjective

stage (in which the child becomes aware of his

or her own body as distinct from the bodies of others):

and an ejective stage (in which the child infers that

people have experiences in their bodies similar to his or

her own). The child’s development is propelled by imitation,

assimilation, and activity.

Baldwin’s developmental theories only became influential

in American psychology after his death. In Paris,

Baldwin maintained close contacts with the French

psychologists Pierre Janet and Edouard Claparede and

the philosopher Henri Bergson. He was also in contact

with the young Jean Piaget, whom he strongly influ enced. Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development

bears strong similarities to Baldwin’s own developmental

theories. Since Piaget’s reception in American psychology,

Baldwin’s contributions have been reassessed

(see, for example, the many contributions in Broughton

and Freeman-Moir, 1982). His conception of organic

evolution has recently become influential in cognitive

psychology (Turney, Whitley, & Anderson 1996).