James McKeen Cattell

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James McKeen Cattell

James McKeen Cattell was born in Easton,
Pennsylvania in 1860, into a wealthy family. His father, William Cassady Cattell, a Presbyterian minister, was president of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His mother, Elizabeth "Lizzie" McKeen, had inherited a large amount of money, which helped the family reach its afluent status.
When he was sixteen, he enrolled in Lafayette College, where he graduated in four years with the highest honors. Despite his later renoun as a scientist, he spent most of his time studying English literature, although he showed a outstanding gift for mathematics as well.He was later awarded a M.A. by the faculty at Lafayette.


Cattell did not find his true vocation until after he arrived in Germany for graduate studies, where studied under Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. He returned to the United States in 1882, and earned a fellowship to Johns Hopkins University, where he conducted his own experimentation with drugs. Cattell used a wide variety of drugs from hashish and morphine, to
caffeine. He also began work measuring simple mental processes, such as the time it took subjects to perform simple mental acts, like naming objects or colors. The following year he returned to Leipzig as Wundt's assistant.

The partnership between the men was proved to be successful, as together they helped establish the formal study of intelligence. Under Wundt, Cattell became his first American student to publish a dissertation in the field of psychology, titled Psychometric Investigation. Furthermore, Cattell tried to explore the interiors of his

own mind through the consumption of the drug hashish, which was legal at the time. While recreational drug use was not rare among early psychologists, including Freud, Cattell's experimentation with hashish was a sign of his
eagerness to go against conventional opinion and
morality. He also built a "gravity chronomete...