Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/20

 mental development—in a word, have been psychologists, who believe that if they can discover the first buddings, the first, tentative shootings-forth of the baby’s mind, they will know better the nature of the developed mind—its essential processes and their relationships, their fusions and correlations.

Besides the naturalists and the psychologists, whose chief concern is to know the child mind, a still larger number of students—chiefly parents and teachers—are attracted to child psychology for practical and moral reasons. As Sully observes:—"The modern world, while erecting the child into an object of æsthetic contemplation, while bringing to bear on him the bull’s-eye lamp of scientific observation, has become sorely troubled about the momentous problem of rearing him." Parents and teachers "have come to see that a clear insight into child-nature and its spontaneous movements, must precede any intelligent attempt to work beneficially upon this nature." To be sure, the chief concern at first, particularly of the mother, is the baby's physical well-being—the basis of normal moral and intellectual development—and to that she will devote her best energies. But since education begins at the cradle—some one has said, "heredity really begins at the cradle"—the parent will wish to understand the characteristics of the baby's mind