Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes

Excerpt from Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes
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 farther 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 1893-94, 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's development, as my previous work had led me to formulate it. This is the problem of Spencer and Romanes.
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