Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/27

 one is that an account of infant activities which analyzes whole pieces of conduct, which isolates and detaches elements or factors of a total experience for purposes of description, is likely to result in disfigurement rather than in accurate picturing and explanation of the piece of conduct thus analyzed. An important principle of modern scientific method is that if one would know the real nature and meaning of a phenomenon, one must see it in its complete setting, and conversely that a process of detaching and isolating inevitably gives a partial and imperfect notion of the phenomenon thus detached from its natural setting. Accordingly one finds a number of writers on the psychology of child development—Dewey, Sully, and King, for example—laying much emphasis on wholeness of view as a necessary condition of the right understanding of child conduct. Thus King in the Preface to his The Psychology of Child Development writes, "These pages emphasize the point that the attempt to study isolated elements of the child's life is radically unscientific; that we must have as nearly as possible the complete setting of an act before we are entitled to say what it is or what it means." And again on a later page King writes, "We can only say of the process in hand that it arises in such a situation and performs a certain function. We thus do not do it the violence of trying to label it according to its most prominent characteristic, ignoring the others as mere