Edward Bradford Titchener 1867-1927 / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1928?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Edward Bradford Titchener 1867-1927 / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    [From THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY (GENERAL SECTION), Vol. XVIII. Part 4, April, 1928.] [All rights reserved.\ ■urn l: THE EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER 1867-1927 By CHARLES S. MYERS. CHARLES LIBRAr i KAtIBNAL!fl8TITUTEtfINDUS:.. , 14. WELBECK STREET. LC * n | wrr-|-TTir By the death of Prof. Titchener Experimental Psychology has lost one of its first British founders. Although he spent the last thirty-five years of his strenuous life in the United States, he remained an Englishman throughout its sixty years. He had but one teaching post—at Cornell University, Ithaca; and there he died on August 3rd last, from a cerebral tumour, after a brief illness. Edward Bradford Titchener came of an old Chichester family. He was born at Chichester on January 11th, 1867. We hear of a certain John Tychenor being headmaster of the local Prebendal School in 1532. To this school went young Edward, and from it he gained a scholarship at Malvern College at the age of fourteen. In his nineteenth year he proceeded to Brasenose, Oxford, where he held a senior classical scholar¬ ship for four years. He obtained a first-class both in Moderations in 1887 and in Literae Humaniores in 1889. He took his B.A. at Oxford in 1890, and his M.A. in 1895; in 1906 he received the degree of D.Sc. at that University. During the academic year 1889-90 he worked as a research student under the celebrated Oxford physiologist, Burdon Sanderson. To him he dedicated his first book. Doubtless owing to his previous studies in philosophy, Titchener became now attracted to the work of Wundt in Leipsic who, having passed from a training in physiology to the study of philosophy, had by a converse route been drawn to experimental psychology. Wundt’s psychological laboratory was then eleven years old. Here Titchener worked for the next two years, with Scripture, Frank Angell, Witmer and Warren from America as fellow-students, and under Kiilpe as Privatdozent. In the eighth volume of Wundt’s Philo- sophische Studien Titchener published a short paper on “Recognition.” In 1892 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy at Leipsic by a disser¬ tation, entitled Ueber binoculare WirJcungen monocularer Reize, which appeared in the same volume of the Studien. Returning to England in that year, Titchener gave for a short time some University extension lectures in biology at Oxford. He endeavoured