James Mark Baldwin

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James Mark Baldwin (January 12, 1861 – November 8, 1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto.^[1] He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.

Baldwin was born and raised in

Baldwin started in theology under the tutelage of the college's president, James McCosh, but soon switched to philosophy, completing a B.A. in 1884. He was awarded the Green Fellowship in Mental Science (named after his future father-in-law, the head of the Princeton Theological Seminary) and used it to study in Germany with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and with Friedrich Paulsen at Berlin during the following year.

In 1886 he became Instructor in French and German at the

During this creative phase Baldwin traveled to France (1892) to visit the important psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot (at the Salpêtrière), Hippolyte Bernheim (at Nancy), and Pierre Janet.

In 1893 he was called back to his alma mater,

In 1897, Baldwin was also elected to the American Philosophical Society.^[3]

In 1899 Baldwin went to Oxford to supervise the completion of the Dictionary... (1902). He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science at

In 1903, partly as a result of a dispute with Princeton president Woodrow Wilson and in part due to an offer involving more pay and less teaching, he moved to a professorship of philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Here, he re-opened the experimental laboratory that had been founded by G. Stanley Hall in 1884 (but had closed with Hall's departure to take over the presidency of Clark University in 1888).

In Baltimore Baldwin started to work on Thoughts and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought, Or Genetic Logic (1906), a densely integrative rendering of his ideas culminating in Genetic Theory of Reality: Being the Outcome of Genetic Logic as Issuing in the Aesthetic Theory of Reality called Pancalism (1915). This book introduced the concept that knowledge grows through childhood in a series of distinct stages that involve interaction between innate abilities and environmental feedback, a proposal that was taken back by Piaget. He further stated that the initial physical development gives way to language and cognitive abilities such that the child emerges as a result of social and physical growth.

In Baltimore also Baldwin was arrested in a raid on a "colored" brothel (1908), a scandal that put an end to his American career. Forced to leave Johns Hopkins, he looked for residence in Paris. He was to reside in France till his death in 1934.^[4]

His first years (1908–1912) in France were interrupted by long stays in Mexico where he advised on university matters and lectured at the School of Higher Studies at the National University in Mexico City. His Darwin and the Humanities (1909) and Individual and Society (1911) date from this period. In 1912 he took permanent residence in Paris.

Baldwin's residence in France resulted in his pointing out the urgency of American non-neutral support for his new hosts on the French battlefields of World War I. He published American Neutrality, Its Cause and Cure (1916) for the purpose, and when in 1916 he survived a German torpedo attack on the Sussex in the English Channel – on the return trip from a visit to William Osler at Oxford – his open telegram to the president of the United States on the affair became frontpage news (New York Times). With the entry of America in the war (1917) he helped to organize the Paris branch of the American Navy League, acting as its Chairman till 1922. In 1926 his memoirs Between Two Wars (1861-1921) were published. He died in Paris on November 8, 1934.

Baldwin was prominent among early experimental psychologists and was voted by his peers as the fifth most important psychologist in America in a 1903 survey conducted by James McKeen Cattell,^[5] but it was his contributions to developmental psychology that were the most important. His stepwise theory of cognitive development was a major influence on the later, and much more widely known, developmental theory of Jean Piaget. His ideas on the relationship of Ego and Alter were developed by Pierre Janet;^[6] while his stress on how "My sense of self grows by imitation of you...an imitative creation"^[7] contributed to the mirror stage of Jacques Lacan.^[8]

His contributions to the young discipline's early journals and institutions were highly significant as well. Baldwin was a co-founder (with James McKeen Cattell) of Psychological Review (which was founded explicitly to compete with G. Stanley Hall's American Journal of Psychology), Psychological Monographs and Psychological Index. He was also the founding editor of Psychological Bulletin.

In 1892 he was vice-president of the International Congress of Psychology held in London, and in 1897–1898 president of the American Psychological Association; he received a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Denmark (1897), and was honorary president of the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Geneva in 1896.

The idea of organic selection came from the interpretation of the observable data in Baldwin's experimental study of infant reaching and its role in mental development. Every practice of the infant's movement intended to advance the integration of behavior favorable to development in the experimental framework appeared to be selected from an excess of movement in the trial of imitation.

In further stages of development – the ones most critical to an understanding of the evolution of mind – this was graphically illustrated in the child's efforts to draw and learning to write. (Mental Development in the Child and the Race)

In later editions of Mental Development Baldwin changed the term "organic selection" into "functional selection".

So, from the outset the idea was well linked to the

It is the communication of this insight into the practice-related nature of dynamogenic development, above all its integration as a creative factor in the fabric of society, that helped the students of Baldwin to understand what was left of

Baldwin's most important theoretical legacy is the concept of the

For example, the incest taboo, if powerfully enforced, removes the natural selection pressure against the possession of incest-favoring instincts. After a few generations without this natural selection pressure, unless such genetic material were profoundly fixed, it would tend to diversify and lose its function. Humans would no longer be innately averse to incest, but would rely on their capacity to internalize such rules from cultural practices.

The opposite case can also be true: cultural practice might

Baldwin's contribution to this field places him at the heart of contemporary controversies in the fields of

Apart from articles in the Psychological Review, Baldwin wrote:

• Handbook of Psychology (1890), translation of Ribot's German Psychology of To-day (1886);
• Elements of Psychology (1893);
• Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1898);
• Story of the Mind (1898);
• Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1896);
• Thought and Things (London and New York, 1906).

He also largely contributed to the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901–1905), of which he was editor in-chief.

• George Herbert Mead
• Life history theory
• Orthogenesis
• Epigenetics
• Pangenesis
• Weismann Barrier
• Evolutionary developmental biology

References

• Robert H. Wozniak Archived 2006-08-15 at the Wayback Machine: Development and Synthesis: An introduction to the Life and Work of James Mark Baldwin Bryn Mawr College, 2001 in: History of American Thought – Thoemmes Continuum/The History of Ideas 14 September 2004
• Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered edited by Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew: Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003 – The MIT Press
• Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity New York, 1979 – E.P.Dutton
• Terrence Deacon: The Symbolic Species: The
  co-evolution of language and the human brain
  USA, 1997 – W.W. Norton / Great Britain, 1997 – Allan Lane The Penguin Press.
• Edward J. Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, Robert V. Blanden: "Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm" Sydney, 1998 – Allan & Unwin Pty Ltd. In: Frontiers of Science – Series Editor Paul Davies.
• Hothersall, David (2004). History of Psychology (4th ed.). New York, NY; McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Baldwin, James Mark".

• Autobiographical notes
• Mead Project: Basic Baldwin
• "Mental Development in the Child and the Race", J.M.Baldwin
• J.M.Baldwin in texts at Classics in the History of Psychology
•  Johnson, Rossiter, ed. (1906). "Baldwin, James Mark". The Biographical Dictionary of America. Vol. 1. Boston: American Biographical Society. p. 196.
• Edited program MP3 and full interview MP3 of Robert Wozniak in conversation with Christopher Green, as they discuss the life and work of Baldwin, from This Week in the History of Psychology
• Documentary film on
  YouTube describing the public controversy that swirled around the hiring of a new professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1889. The debate was focused on the prospect of an American, Baldwin, being hired over a Canadian competitor, James Gibson Hume
  , who later headed the Toronto philosophy department for 30 years.
• Works by James Mark Baldwin at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about James Mark Baldwin at the Internet Archive
• James Mark Baldwin at Find a Grave