Both a philosopher and a psychologist, Mary Whiton Calkins merged speculative metaphysics with rigorous scientific research. She held the concept of the person to be the meeting point of these approaches, and she spent a lifetime fusing a "psychology of selves" paradigm in psychology with a personal-idealist philosophical account of reality. As her friend and colleague Eleanor A. Gamble said in the volume In Memoriam: Mary Whiton Calkins 1863-1930 (1931), "that personalism should prevail both in psychology and philosophy was her most passionate interest as a scholar and as a teacher." An able historian of philosophy and one of the most prominent students of the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce, Calkins developed a position that she described as "absolutistic personalistic idealism."

Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 30 March 1863 to Wolcott Calkins, a Presbyterian minister, and Charlotte Whiton Calkins. The family moved to Philadelphia when she was two and...