At dinner with a group of undergraduates this spring, Edwin Garrigues Boring, Edgar Pierce Emeritus Professor of Psychology, was commenting with delight on the University's provision of special funds for professors emeritus. "That's so Harvardian," he exclaimed, but then checked himself: "Of course I'm not really a Harvard man; I've only been here since 1922." Despite being such a newcomer to Harvard, Boring guided the Department of Psychology for a generation, a distinction he shares only with William James. Beyond that, as author of two classics in psychology for a generation, a distinction he shares only with William James. Beyond that, as author of two classics in psychology, he created the historical self-consciousness which has become a part of psychologists all over the world.

In conversation, Boring keeps returning to two topics: "the great E. B. Titchener," the magnetic tyrant of psychology at Cornell early in this century; and the Zeitgeist, a concept he uses to explain his extraordinary personal influence in the history of Harvard psychology.

Boring went to Cornell in 1904 intending to major in mechanical engineering, and in fact received his M.E. in 1908. But his was not an orthodox program. To the profane astonishment of the professor of mechanical engineering, Boring chose English composition and psychology as two of his elective courses.

He is not now sure why, though he has some idea. At the Friends Select School in Philadelphia, he recalls, "in my day we had a class of four boys and eleven girls. We once started a football team, and I was put on left end. We then got beaten in our only game, after which we disbanded. I was not athletic and was terrified at being driven into something where I would be ridiculed. I remember paying a boy twenty-five cents to teach me to kick a football. It didn't work. When the girls took over, I fit in better. I was caught up in the lit-ry aspects of things. I helped found a journal, became interested in writing."

Boring's interest in psychology followed a general boyhood interest in science. He lived with a family of many relatives over his great-grandfather's drug store in Philadelphia. "There were lots of us in those three floors. I learned to read at home, since I went to school quite late. And I had very few friends my age; I played alone.

"I think all the scientific things came after I was nine. I remember being struck by the permanence of matter: on my fifth birthday I had a fire engine, but I lost the wheel under the cellar stairs; I found it four or five years later and actually put it back on.

"Somewhere along in here I began to get excited about magnets, and I remember discovering electric bells and batteries. With my allowance I bought a pound of wire, a battery and a bell--I guess I was fourteen. I made batteries with potassium dichromate dissolved in sulfuric acid. I had a little workshop in the storeroom. Once, to show the batteries, I carried them out on a tray and tripped; I spilled sulfuric acid all over the living room floor."

The first evidence of interest in psychology specifically came just after senior high school: "The girl I was fondest of said, 'Don't take psychology, it will make you morbid.' That probably had something to do with it."

Boring enrolled in Titchener's course in elementary psychology in the fall of 1905; the verve of Titchener's lecturing remained vivid five years later when, after working eighty-four hours a week for a year in a steel plant, Boring went back to Cornell. He intended to try for an A.M. in physics, so he could teach, but again got trapped into psychology--this time by earthworms, paramecia, and flatworms.

Titchener's influence and character Boring has detailed in his autobiography and in psychological journals; Titchener's persona effect was so great that, even now at age 76, when Boring wishes to support a point, he often does so with a quote from Titchener.

In 1922, Harvard and Stanford offered Boring jobs. Stanford promised a higher salary and a higher position. Boring chose Harvard. He began his career with a six-week hospitalization from an auto accident. He comments: "I have no proof that the accident did not make me brighter. Medical science lacks controls."

This psychologist's concern for controls made Boring uncomfortable at Harvard, for the psychologists were still in a department dominated by philosophers. The discomfort was also a challenge: Boring felt a "mission to rescue Harvard psychology from the philosophers." Though he eventually saved psychology from the philosophers by bisecting the department, he recalls that he never reformed the philosophers. "At the party celebrating the separation of the psychology and philosophy departments, I said, as usual, that psychology needs controls. Whitehead made a delightful little speech: 'They devote their lives to studying the human mind and still they don't trust it.'"

Again, when General Education in a Free Society was published at the end of World War II, Boring took the floor of the Faculty meeting to ask: "Where is your control? How do you know this thing will work?" He suggested that the College be divided in two, one half to receive Gen Ed courses, the other to go without. "Conant replied petulantly, 'You can't test it!' Who knows? He may have been right. But I wonder. At any rate, one interesting thing about the report was that it showed how far Harvard's prestige extended; my sister was teaching biology at Yenching University in Peiping and everyone out there became very excited about it."

On both of these occasions, while crying for controls, Boring was overseeing the creation of the present Department of Psychology. In 1934 he moved before the Faculty that the Department of Philosophy and Psychology be separated into two departments under one Division, and two years later he moved that divisions be abolished if the departments wished. The success of these motions Boring attributes to the Zeitgeist: "The Zeitgeist had this event up its sleeve all along. Thus I had another lesson as to how the free action of personal will in a naturalistic world is a delusion."

Boring was chairman of the Department for the first two years of its existence, and found himself again in that position in 1945 when the Department of Social Relations came into existence. Boring suggested that the Psychological Laboratory leave Emerson Hall for the Social Relations people and move into the laboratory S. S. Stevens had created in the basement of Memorial Hall. There Boring began to revise his 1929 History of Experimental Psychology, to work in "the paradox of the Zeitgeist which controls the Great Men and yet is controlled by them."