Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/357

Rh of children," what danger is there in a "delay" which permits the object to become more deeply graven on the child's mind? Why is it so "necessary to become familiar with hundreds of specimens" in a given time? Why not rather with a few, a very few striking and typical forms, around which subsequent knowledge can group itself? The comparison of a multitude of objects in order to abstract their common characters, and thus obtain the generic or class conception, is suited to the scientific but not to the pre-scientific stage of progress. It does not, therefore, belong to the fruitful moment of first attraction to an object, which, for the adult mind, precedes scientific discovery, and contains the hidden forces which lead to this. Still less does it belong to the first mental efforts of childhood. Early childhood is a period for the differentiation of the details of a universe, which, to the earliest perceptions, appears to consist entirely of homogeneous masses of light and shade. In the first efforts of the mind these masses are broken up and separated from one another, and portions reintegrated into actual individuals. Thus the moon is separated from the windowpane, the child's limbs are integrated into a body, which at last is positively known to be different from other moving forms, etc. It is in accordance with this spontaneous and, indeed, inevitable mode of development of perception that the first educated efforts of perception should be directed toward the more intense individualization of objects, and not to their classification; toward the thorough appreciation of specific differences rather than to that of generic resemblances. Hence, a second reason for beginning the study of botany—say, rather, the observation of life—with the flower, although more complex, and not with the simpler leaf. It is because the individual differences of the flower are so much more striking, and—as the poets show us—the flower is so much more readily individualized and personified.

The period of development with which my "experiment" was concerned may be called the pre-scientific stage of mental existence. It is that during which the mind may be busily occupied in collecting the data for science, but can not itself wield scientific methods. Its efforts should be directed in accordance with scientific principles of psychology, and the knowledge acquired arranged in such orderly sequence that, when the mind is ripe for them, scientific relations will be readily perceived and understood. But discussion of such relations seems to me entirely premature for the age here considered, and, indeed, for a much later period.

Scientific observation is observation of the relations between things. But, before any attempt be made to study these relations, the things themselves should be firmly and clearly apprehended. The different degree of grasp possessed by different minds depends largely upon