People From Philadelphia

"So far as consciousness goes, one does one's thinking before one knows what he is to think about."

"[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."

"Titchener interest lay in the generalized, normal, adult mind that had also been Wundt's main concern."

"Broca’s famous observation was in itself very simple. There had in 1831 been admitted at the Bicêtre, an insane hospital near Paris, a man whose sole defect seemed to be that he could not talk. He communicated intelligently by signs and was otherwise mentally normal. He remained at the Bicêtre for thirty years with this defect and on April 12, 1861, was put under the care of Broca, the surgeon, because of a gangrenous infection. Broca for five days subjected him to a careful examination, in which he satisfied himself that the musculature of the larynx and articulatory organs was not hindered in normal movements, that there was no other paralysis that could interfere with speech, and that the man was intelligent enough to speak. On April 17 the patient— fortunately, it must have seemed, for science—died; and within a day Broca had performed an autopsy, discovering a lesion in the third frontal convolution of the left cerebral hemisphere, and had presented the brain in alcohol to the Société d’Anthropologie."

"Leibniz foreshadowed the entire doctrine of the unconscious, but Herbart actually began it. Wundt was to appeal first to unconscious inference in order to explain perception, and then to apperception. Fechner was to take from Herbart the notion of the measurement of the magnitude..."

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

"Sometimes I fear that, if Harvard does not give up trying to turn itself from an Institution of Learning into an Educational Institution, we may have a generation of professors whose duty it will be to disseminate information which they have not the time to acquire."

"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."

"Half the time I read Hayek's The Sensory Order with amazement at the extent of his reading and comprehension … he is right … most of the time."

"Do you have to ask? Willie was pretty good and we never really had a regular left fielder all those years, so I guess I can make room for him in there somewhere."

"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."

"Psychologically attention is drainage, whatever it may be physiologically."

"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too."

"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!"

"Proponents of the cyclical view of history will find in the 1920s poignant parallels with contemporary controversies between "pure" and "applied" psychologists. During that decade no advocate of the ideal of pure research was more embroiled professionally in the bitter debates surrounding that issue than E. G. Boring. While preoccupied with the practicalist challenge, Boring was also at work on his prodigious History of Experimental Psychology."

"Once Boring was invited to dinner at Titchener’s to celebrate Titchener’s birthday. After dinner the cigars were passed and Boring could not refuse under the circumstances, though he had never smoked a cigar. The consequence was that he had to excuse himself presently because of his nausea and go outside to throw up. Still, the honor of having been invited once was so great that every year thereafter Titchener’s birthday would be celebrated by dinner at the Boring home, followed by the smoking of a cigar, with the inevitable consequence."

"Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science."

"Introspection with inference and meaning left out as much as possible becomes a dull taxonomic account of sensory events which, since they suggest almost no functional value for the organism, are peculiarly uninteresting to the American scientific temper."

"The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter."

"In his approach to the history of psychology, E. G. Boring (1886–1968) stressed the importance of the Zeitgeist in determining whether, or to what extent, an idea or viewpoint will be accepted. Clearly, ideas do not occur in a vacuum. A new idea, to be accepted or even considered, must be compatible with existing ideas. In other words, a new idea will be tolerated only if it arises within an environment that can assimilate it."

"[ Titchener ] always seemed to me the nearest approach to genius of anyone with whom I have been closely associated.… He was competent with languages, and could ad lib in Latin when the occasion required it. If you had mushrooms, he would tell you at once how they should be cooked. If you were buying oak for a new floor, he would at once come forward with all the advantages of ash. If you were engaged to be married, he would have his certain and insistent advice about the most unexpected aspects of your problems, and if you were honeymooning, he would write to remind you, as he did me, on what day you ought to be back at work."

"The gift of professional maturity comes only to the psychologist who knows the history of his science."

"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."

"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."

"The key role in creation of the origin myth of psychology as a “laboratory science” belongs to Edwin Boring (1929)."

"...in Palau I seemed to be the perfect princess, this time I was competitive and sometimes the bad guy. I played competitively both times. I think there is a happy medium to me. I'm not perfect or horrible. I've always had to work hard for everything I've gotten in life. I went in to bust my butt and I hope people can respect me for that. I played the game the way it was designed to be played..."

"Coming into the game, I didn't think I would get far. But when I did, there were only two people who were blindsided on the jury. After Jamie and Judd were in the jury, it became obvious that I was the right person to take to the end – back at Jury camp, one bad seed spoils the bunch. That was when it became obvious I couldn't win."

"The world is dark and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story."

"Her mother called to her. She said, "Where are you going, Flora Belle?" Flora didn't answer her. She never answered her mother when she called her Flora Belle. Sometimes she didn't answer her mother when she called her Flora either."

"That was the thing about tragedy. It was just sitting there, keeping you company, waiting. And you had absolutely no idea."

"Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel. Huge portions of what is loosely termed "the squirrel brain" are given over to one thought: food. The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this: I wonder what there is to eat."

"Anything could happen. Together, she and Ulysses could change the world. Or something."

"Say it, reader. Say the word "quest" out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn't it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.so trthen despererux died i n heaven and in peace"

"Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name. Nothing."

"There is no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"?"

"If the rat had not looked over his shoulder, perhaps his heart would not have broken. And it is possible, then, that I would not have a story to tell. But, reader, he did look."

"There is those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves is a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman."

"When you are a king, you may make as many ridiculous laws as you like. That is what being a king is all about."

"And hope is like love... a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing."

"Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light."

"Despereaux looked down at the book, and something remarkable happened. The marks on the pages, the "squiggles" as Merlot referred to them, arranged themselves into shapes. The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time"

"Despereaux did not know it, but he would need, very soon, to be brave himself."

"Reader, you may ask this question; in fact, you must ask this question: Is it ridiculous for a very small, sickly, big-eared mouse to fall in love with a beautiful human princess named Pea? The answer is... yes. Of course, it's ridiculous. Love is ridiculous."

"Despereaux marveled at his own bravery. He admired his own defiance. And then, reader, he fainted. :("

"Great art is an instant arrested in eternity."

"He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom."

"Barry supported the lady, whose voice was not powerful enough for the big auditorium. I asked him how she succeeded—I was at another theatre. "Obscene but not heard," he answered."

"Commons provided the cardinal reason for the unions' absence of hostility to Taylorism: "... the unions have generally come to the point of confining their attention to wages — that is, to distribution — leaving to employers the question of production." ... The "management's rights" clause found in every U.S. union contract ... vests the sole right to set work methods, job design, assignments, etc. with management. ... In fact, well before the War the idea began spreading that unionization, with its standard "management's rights" clause contracts, was the best approach for fitting the Taylorist yoke on the workers. The efficacy of this "trojan horse" tactic of union mediation led Thompson to prescribe industrial unionism over the AFL's craft unionism as the best way the secure the Taylor system in industry."

"When Taylor began his efforts at the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, several members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers were likewise interested in labor management. Industrial capitalism was running up against renewed resistance from the growing ranks of labor, still committed to a sense of work integrity and craftsmanship. Task management, or scientific management as it came to be called, began to take shape in the eighties as the way to break the worker's threatening resistance. The heart of this approach is the systematic reduction of work into discrete, routinized tasks, totally separated from any policy decisions about the job. ... For capitalism to be firmly in control, it must monopolize information and techniques as surely as it controls the rest of the means of production. The worker must be permitted only to perform certain specific narrow tasks as planned by management."

"Despite the pseudo-scientific apologies for the Taylorist approach, the public readily developed a very negative view of it. As the Taylor Society admitted with surprising candor, scientific management was widely seen as "the degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under the direction of a small body of experts—into men debarred from creative participation in their work.""