ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the upbringing and young adulthood of Granville Stanley Hall. Born to a conventional Calvinist family in a rural farming community in Western Massachusetts, Hall’s early life could hardly have been more different from William James’s eclectic cosmopolitanism. Hall’s early education was near home, though he traveled to Williams College for undergraduate study, where he was introduced to the empiricist associationism of John Stuart Mill and the controversial transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hall then went to Union Seminary in New York City, where he first immersed himself in the diversity of American urbanism. Here he explored a range of religious options, and he first read the major scientific and positivist works of the era. He traveled to Germany to learn the new “higher criticism” Biblical studies, and also had his first encounter with laboratory physiology. Upon his return to the US, he graduated and moved to Ohio for a teaching position at Antioch College. He came into contact with William T. Harris’ Hegelian circle in St. Louis, but it was Wilhelm Wundt’s new textbook on physiological psychology that moved him to attempt a return to Germany for more graduate training.
