Elliott, Richard M.

Basic Biographical Information

Born: November 3, 1887; Died: May 6, 1969.

Elliott was born in Lowell, Massachusetts to Unitarian parents who encouraged his scholarly gifts. He matriculated at Dartmouth where he intended to study astronomy but concluded that his abilities in mathematics and physics precluded a career in physical science. He found philosophic debate congenial and arrived at graduate school at Harvard in 1910, to his regret one month after the death of William James. He did his doctoral work with Munsterberg on handwriting, but his most significant mentors were E. B. Holt and R. M. Yerkes. He was attuned to Holt’s balancing of aesthetic sensibility with a realistic epistemology. Elliott considered continuing as an experimentalist for a time after his Ph.D. in 1913 but found, while teaching at Harvard, that his heart was not in it. The First World War then intervened and Elliott found himself in a battalion of mental testers under the command of Donald G. Paterson. After...