Member Directory,
1847 - 1922
Charles A. Strong
Lecturer on Psychology, Columbia College
Centurion, 1899–1940
George L. Peabody and Nicholas Murray Butler
Haverhill, Massachusetts
Florence, Italy
Age thirty-six
Sleepy Hollow, New York
Archivist’s Notes
Brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Century Memorial
Probably very few present members of the Century knew Charles A. Strong, who died in January of 1940; for although he has appeared in the Club Book as a resident member since 1899, he lived abroad almost continuously after 1911. But a few, especially older members of the Columbia faculty, who have been interested in philosophy and psychology, remember well his handsome head and clean-chiseled features, his gentle manners and the eager tenacity with which his mind clung to the topic of discourse if it happened to be one that interested him.
Born in Haverford [sic: Haverhill], Massachusetts, in 1862, educated, at the Rochester Theological Seminary, at Harvard, and in Germany, he turned away from the ministry for which his father had at first intended him, and devoted himself thereafter to philosophy and psychology, teaching in various ranks from that of instructor to that of professor successively at Cornell, Clark University, the University of Chicago, and finally Columbia. The philosophical problem which absorbed him and which he pursued with an unflagging intensity of interest was that of the origin of mind in the universe. In several original books he strove for an explanation consistent with the principles of natural science. His writing was marked by an exceptional delicacy and a discrimination of ideas and terms, and by the simplicity and clarity of his style. As he grew older, these qualities of his writing seemed more and more to characterize the manner and personality of the man. His wife’s ill-health was perhaps initially a reason why he gave up teaching and began to spend most of his time in the south of France and Italy. Later, his own condition was such that it was not easy for him to move around, and so it came about that he spent his last years in the Villa le Balze at Fiesole, and ceased to appear at the Century.
Those of his friends who could visit him in Italy will cherish their last memories of him as they saw him there—a strikingly handsome old invalid seated on the lovely terrace of the Tuscan villa, welcoming, friendly and ready for talk; but ready, too, to return to the companionship of his books and his solitary philosophical quest.
Geoffrey Parsons
1940 Century Memorials
