Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/371

Rh to the relatively complex. The whole process is one of building simpler elements into more complicated relations, and it goes on just the same in the minds of children as of adults. The increase of knowledge, the increase of faculty, the increase of mental power, all resolve themselves into a finer discrimination, a greater clearness of perception, and a wider grasp of the relations among objects of thought. The mind can not be worked backward because its processes are organically determined; and every step of increasing intelligence is a step of increasing complication. These considerations are decisive as to the main issue of the present controversy.

Mrs. Jacobi repeatedly affirms a "pre-scientific stage" of mental development; and her whole case depends upon the validity of this position, and what she means by it. She indicates her idea of what it is by saying: "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." But it has been shown that this is not possible. Neither children nor anybody else can apprehend things apart from their relations; they know them either vaguely or clearly, partially or fully, only by perceiving their relations. Mrs. Jacobi's distinguishing mark of the "pre-scientific stage" thus disappears, and all the reasoning by which she would put off the study of plants in their relations, or with a view to classification to a late period of study, falls to the ground. She says, "The comparison of a multitude of objects in order to abstract their common character, and thus obtain the generic or class conception, is suited to the scientific but not to the pre-scientific stage of progress." The only meaning that can be given to this statement is that there are stages of classification too complex for children at the outset of study; but it is a grave error to suppose that the properly guided pupil is to come suddenly upon the formidable work of classification as a new task. The child has been classing things from its birth, and in its earliest observations upon the simplest parts of plants it enters upon an easy stage of classification, and it is through these exercises that the higher work is gradually reached. The process is continuous. The child from the first has been comparing objects and abstracting their common characters. It matters nothing that at first this action is automatic; it leads to conscious classing and is of the same nature with it. Progress in the formation of such general ideas as chair, cat, dog, may be clearly seen by the intelligent observer to consist in the comparison of the members of all such groups of objects and an abstraction of their common characters. Of course, this work is imperfect at first. The failures of children in forming correct general notions of some complexity was well illustrated by a little boy under three years of age, when his sympathies were appealed to in behalf of the cat he was teasing by the statement that he too was an animal. This he indignantly repelled, and, springing to his feet, he caught the skirt of his