Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/28

 of the more reflective, and hence the superior sort of adults; it fell into the disastrous fallacy of viewing a child as simply a little man. Just as modern medicine, by rejecting a similar fallacy on the physical plane, has set up the science and art of pediatrics, so the new behaviourist psychology has given a new dignity and autonomy to the study of the child mind. The first steps were very difficult. The behaviourists not only had to invent an entirely new technique, like the pediatricians before them; they also had to meet the furious opposition of the orthodox psychologists, whose moony speculations they laughed at and whose authority they derided. But they persisted, and the problems before them turned out, in the end, to be relatively simple, and by no means difficult to solve. By observing attentively what was before everyone’s nose they quickly developed facts which left the orthodox psychologists in an untenable and absurd position. One by one, the old psychological categories went overboard, and with them a vast mass of vague and meaningless psychological terminology.

On the cleared ground remained a massive discovery: that the earliest and most profound