Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/8



Studies composing this volume are based, in the main, upon a record which I kept of my child R. from his birth to the end of his third year, and they are made up in large measure of transcripts from my note-books.

The principal aim of the Studies is to present data, observational and experimental, bearing upon certain aspects of infant mind which have a special attraction for me, mainly because they seem to be fundamental to later mental development; also for the reason that in studying them one is carried back to the rudimentary processes from which spring the leading characteristics of the developed mind. My original plan was to make notes as full as time would permit and as accurate as possible, and then to print the bare record. But this plan was abandoned for two reasons: first, it was found that additional explanation was necessary to make the record intelligible. In the second place, one cannot undertake the arrangement of material of this kind without thinking about it, without wondering what it means, why and how it came to be what it is, what were the conditions of its appearance, what are its inter-relations, and what its relation to later mental development.