Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/440

424 characteristics are assumed always to go together), or to avoid, withdraw from, escape that stimulus, provided it be vitally detrimental (or painful). Every student of the association-evolution psychology will at once recognize this as Dr. Bain's Law of Self-Conservation, with one or two somewhat important modifications. For instance, while both writers begin with the fundamental fact of native motor spontaneity in organisms, Professor Baldwin takes a wider view of this spontaneity, making the organism react to all kinds of stimuli, instead of confining its reaction to kinaesthetic muscular feelings, and endowing it with a certain power of selection among these stimuli. This principle is applied in the broadest possible way, and the fact of Imitation, as thus defined, is declared to exist wherever there is life. Everything in the way of response to conditions is explained by it, from the phenomena of heliotropism and geotropism in the vegetable world and the swarming of protozoa to the light, to the most delicate decisions of conscious volition in the human adult. Moreover, it is held to account, not only for that 'natural selection' through whose action the 'fittest' organisms survive, but also for 'organic selection,' by which the survival of the fittest organs and reactions in the individual is secured. It is at this point that phylogenesis and ontogenesis are brought under a single conception.

The first six chapters of the book are devoted, after some preliminary remarks on the relation between individual and race development, to the description and explanation of the author's observations of his own children. He seems to attach very little importance to all the child-observation that has hitherto been done, and to hold the view that none but psychologists (with their theories) are competent observers of children. Many of us will dissent from this opinion, and still more from his sweeping arraignment of the whole teaching profession, where he calls the teacher "a machine for administering a single experiment to an infinite variety of children," and declares that "it is perfectly certain that two out of every three children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the school" (p. 38). But to pass on to his method of child-study. Proceeding on the principle that motor response is the surest index to mental content, the experiments are arranged in such a way as to measure this motor response to various stimuli. This is the dynamogenic method based directly upon the general law that the reflex arc tends to complete itself. The color-perceptions of the child were made the first subject of investigation, with the result that the chief colors in the order of attractiveness, as measured by