In this genetic tracing back of the complexities of man’s mental life to
their primitive elements in the child’s consciousness, questions of
peculiar interest will arise. A problem which though having a venerable
antiquity is still full of meaning concerns the precise relation of the
higher forms of intelligence and of sentiment to the elementary facts of
the individual’s life-experience. Are we to regard all our ideas, even
those of God, as woven by the mind out of its experiences, as Locke
thought, or have we certain ‘innate ideas’ from the first? Locke thought
he could settle this point by observing children. To-day, when the
philosophic emphasis is laid not on the date of appearance of the
‘innate’ intuition, but on its originality and spontaneity, this method
of interrogating the child’s mind may seem less promising. Yet if of
less philosophical importance than was once supposed, it is of great
psychological importance. There are certain questions, such as that of
how we come to see things at a distance from us, which can be approached
most advantageously by a study of infant movements. In like manner I
believe the growth of a moral sentiment, of that feeling of reverence
for duty to which Kant gave so eloquent an expression, can only be
understood by the most painstaking observation of the mental activities
of the first years.
There is, however, another, and in a sense a larger, source of
psychological interest in studying the processes and development of the
infant mind. It was pointed out above that to the evolutional biologist
the child exhibits man in his kinship to the lower sentient world. This
same evolutional point of view enables the psychologist to connect the
unfolding of an infant’s mind with something which has gone before, with
the mental history of the race. According to this way of looking at
infancy the successive phases of its mental life are a brief _resumé_ of
the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species.
The periods dominated successively by sense and appetite, by blind
wondering and superstitious fancy, and by a calmer observation and a
juster reasoning about things, these steps mark the pathway both of the
child-mind and of the race-mind.
This being so, the first years of a child, with their imperfect verbal
expression, their crude fanciful ideas, their seizures by rage and
terror, their absorption in the present moment, acquire a new and
antiquarian interest. They mirror for us, in a diminished distorted
reflection no doubt, the probable condition of primitive man. As Sir
John Lubbock and other anthropologists have told us, the intellectual
and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and
children are numerous and close. They will be illustrated again and
again in the following studies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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