Early life Baldwin was born on January 12, 1861 and raised in
Columbia, South Carolina. His father, who was from Connecticut, was an
abolitionist and was known to purchase slaves in order to free them. During the
Civil War his father moved north, but the family remained in their home until the time of
Sherman's March. Upon their return after the war, Baldwin's father was part of the
Reconstruction Era government. Baldwin was sent north to receive his secondary education in New Jersey. As a result, he chose to attend the College of New Jersey (now
Princeton University). 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
Princeton Theological Seminary. He translated
Théodule-Armand Ribot's
German Psychology of Today and wrote his first paper "The Postulates of a Physiological Psychology". Ribot's work traced the origins of psychology from
Immanuel Kant through
Johann Friedrich Herbart,
Gustav Theodor Fechner,
Hermann Lotze to
Wundt. In 1887, while working as a professor of philosophy at
Lake Forest College, he married Helen Hayes Green, the daughter of the president of the seminary,
William Henry Green. At Lake Forest, he published the first part of his
Handbook of Psychology (Senses and Intellect) in which he directed attention to the new experimental psychology of
Ernst Heinrich Weber,
Fechner and
Wundt. He also completed his master's degree from Princeton. In 1889, he completed his doctoral degree, also from Princeton. In 1899 Baldwin went to Oxford to supervise the completion of the
Dictionary... (1902). He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science at
Oxford University. (In the light of the foregoing, the deafening silence with which J. M. Baldwin was later treated in Oxford publications on the mind may well come to be regarded as one of the significant omissions in the history of ideas for the 20th century. Compare for example
Richard Gregory:
The Oxford Companion to the Mind, first edition, 1987.)
Later life 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. 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 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. ==Ideas==