Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Preface to the First Edition (Abridged)
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IN writing this book I have had rather conflicting aims. It was begun as a series of articles reporting observations on infants, published in part in the journal Science, 1890-1892. In the prosecution of this purpose, however, I found it necessary constantly to enlarge my scope for the entertainment of a widened genetic view. This came to clearer consciousness in the treatment of the child's imitations, especially when I came to the relation of imitation to volition, as treated in my paper before the London Congress of Experimental Psychology in 1892. The further study of this subject brought what was to me such a revelation of the genetic function of imitation that I then determined--under the inspiration, also, of the small group of writers lately treating the subject--to work out a theory of mental development in the child, incorporating this new insight.
This occupied my thought, and was made the topic of my graduate Seminar in psychology at Princeton, in 1893-1894, the result being the conviction that no consistent view of mental development in the individual could possibly be reached without a doctrine of the race development of consciousness,--i.e. the great problem of the evolution of mind.
I then fell to reading again the literature of biological evolution, with view to a possible synthesis of the current biological theory of organic adaptation with the doctrine of the infant'" development' as my previous work had led me to formulate it.
(viii) This is the problem of Spencer and Romanes. My book is then mainly a treatise on this problem; but the method of approach to it which I have described, accounts for the preliminaries and incidents of treatment which make my book so different in its topics and arrangement from theirs, and from any work constructed from the start with a 'System of Genetic Psychology' in view.
For this reason the question of arrangement was an excessively difficult one to me. The relations of individual development to race development are so intimate--the two are so identical, in fact--that no topic in the one can be treated with great clearness without assuming results in the other. So any order of treatment in such a work must seem finally to be only the least of possible evils.
My final arrangement of chapters presents, however, when a patient reader is in front of the page, a fair degree of reason, I think. The earliest chapters (I. to VI.) are devoted to the statement of the genetic problem, with reports of the facts of infant life and the methods of investigating them, and the mere teasing out of the strings of law on which the facts are beaded--the principles of Suggestion, Habit, Accommodation, etc. These chapters have their own end as well, giving researches of some value, possibly, for psychology and education. They serve their purpose also in the progress of the book, as giving a statement of the central problem of motor adaptation. Chapter V. gives a detailed analysis of one voluntary function, Handwriting. Then follows the theory of adaptation, stated in general terms in Chapters VII. and VIII.; and afterwards comes a genetic view in detail (Chaps. IX. to XVI.) of the progress of mental development in its great stages, Memory, Association, Attention, Thought, Self-consciousness, Volition. So the whole is a whole, the theory resting upon an induction of facts (put before it) and supported
(ix) by the deduction of facts (put after). It is now (3d ea.) divided into four parts, ' Introduction,' ' Experimental Foundation,' 'Biological Development and ' Psychological Development.'
The book really represents, therefore, five years of very close work; and the distribution of the topics over this period accounts for the fact that the chapters, in many instances, include in more or less modified form articles which I have contributed to the reviews. It will now be clear that all were written in the course of development of one intellectual impulse, and so have their only adequate presentation and justification in this volume. I am indebted to the editors and publishers of certain journals for this present use of some of the material, e.g. Mind, The Philosophical Review, The Psychological Review, The American Journal of Psychology, The Popular Science Monthly, The Century Magazine, Science, The Educational Review.
There are certain other great provinces, besides, which I find capable of fruitful exploration with the same theoretical principles. Of course, genetic psychology ought to lay the only solid foundation for education, both in its method and its results. And it is equally true, though it has never been adequately realized, that it is in genetic theory that social or collective psychology must find both its root and its ripe fruitage. We have no social psychology, because we have had no doctrine of the socius. We have had theories of the ego and the alter; but that they did not reveal the socius is just their condemnation. So the theorist of society and institutions has floundered in seas of metaphysics and biology, and no psychologist has brought him a life-preserver, nor even heard his cry for help. These aspects of the subject I hope to take up in somewhat the same way in another work, already well under way, to bear the same general title as this volume, but to be known by the sub-title, Social and Ethical Interpretations,
(x) in contrast with the Methods and Processes, by which this book is described more particularly on the title-page. It will endeavour to find a basis in the natural history of man as a social being for the theory and practice of the activities in which his life of education, social co-operation, and duty involves him.
Many of the particular points of view of this proposed work are indicated by foot-notes in this volume, on pages where the principles discussed strike deeper into the social life. Such intimations are especially brought out in Chapters X. to XVI.
The classes of men whom I hope therefore to interest are first, of course, psychologists,--in my theories,--and then teachers and writers on education,--in the outcome. I have not had the latter class in mind as much in this book as I do in the later one, for obvious reasons; but yet I hope the treatment will be found untechnical enough to profit teachers who are not professed psychologists. To this end all the original observations and experiments on children which are scattered through the book are gathered in a list in Appendix 1.
Then there are the biologists--one almost despairs of them I Are there any yet born to follow the two I have named in finding mind as interesting as life? We must believe that the future is big with them,--and the near future, too. But if any biologist is wiring to listen, he may care to recognize in the chorus of those who are singing the praise of the ruler of our time, the naturalist, and playing to him on instruments--the tibia of the archaic horse, the antennae of the hymenoptera, the many stops of the hydra's legs--the plaintive note of one who but tries to interpret the wail of the human babe But I am not prepared to dispute the point with any of my readers who find such an expectation quite too optimistic. [1]
(xi)
There is one point in the range of the great topic of development itself to which I wish to refer, in order to avoid misunderstanding. I believe in the widest possible expansion of the idea of natural history as applied to consciousness. But I also believe that the natural history question is not the same as the question of the essence or nature or explanation of mind. Philosophy has its problem just the same, however consciousness arose, and no amount of evolution theory can settle the problem set by philosophy. I hope to take up this question of 'origin vs. nature' later on.[2]
J. M. B.
PRINCETON, N.J., March, 1895
