SOURCE: "Woodrow Wilson's Concept of Human Nature," in Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 1, No. 1, May, 1957, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Curti examines Wilson's writings, as well as aspects of his personal life and certain of his actions as a public figure, to determine his views on several humanistic and philosophical issues, including action versus contemplation, ethics and morality, and environment versus heredity, particularly as the latter dichotomy bears on the significance of race in Wilson's concept of "the capacity for self-government."

One Sunday afternoon, it must have been in 1884, a young man bent on earning a doctorate of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, took a long walk with one of his professors. The professor was G. Stanley Hall, who was introducing to America the new scientific study of human nature in which he had recently been trained in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt, the father of...