Calkins, M. W. “Converging Lines in Contemporary Psychology,” Brit. Jour. Psy. (Gen’l Section), Jan., 1926, pp. 171-179. Koffka, K. Growth of the Mind. New York, 1925. MacCurdy, J. T. Problems in Dynamic Psychology, New York, 1922. Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man. New York, 1913. Watson, J. B. Behaviorism. New York: People’s Institute Pub. Co. Whitehead, A. N. Science and the Modern World. New York, 1925. Woodworth, R. S. Dynamic Psychology. New York, 1918. XII CHILDHOOD AS A REVEALER OF HUMAN CAPACITIES The attitude of disillusionment puts the mind into a prison upon whose walls hang pictures of life at which the prisoner continually gazes. Make the round of your cell, O prisoner, and tell me what stages of life you find represented. There are no children in any of the pictures! The apparent evidence that humanity is doomed to low types of motivation is drawn from a fraction of experience at particular stages of life. None is derived from childhood, scarcely any from adolescence; nearly all of it comes from the fully adult period which, being most conventionalized and least plastic, is least able to reveal to us our unrealized possibilities. If we desire to witness our elemental propensities, or nearly all of them, in unrestrained swing, let us observe children. Not yet encrusted with custom, not yet halter-broken to the emotional restraints of their elders, they “let go” readily. What is inside shows outwardly. At least this is relatively true as compared with us who have endured the bit so long that we take it to be a part of our nature. And a great variety, indeed, there is inside a child; in an hour you shall witness a range of motivation that you might not discover in a grown-up in a score of years. Here is nature in the raw, or nearly so. What impression, then, does childhood make upon us when we become intimate with it? A mixed impression: Amusement at the simple, literal, and unashamed reproduction of our own foibles; something like astonishment at the (usually) easy transitions between desirable and undesirable conduct; a sort of fascination by the utter naturalness of generosity, alongside the equal naturalness of pinching self-regard; and (if we are analytic) a bit of self-searching when we realize the deep dependence of both upon conditioning circumstances as well as upon original tendencies. All this, but never disrespect--at least never after one has taken the trouble to trace the processes of children’s minds. A really understanding intimacy with the young appears invariably to produce respect for them.