Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/868

850 The Origin of Volition; The Mechanism of Revival—Internal Speech and Song; Origin of Attention; Summary: Final Statement of Habit and Accommodation. These titles, as well as those given above of the sections of an earlier chapter, are very attractive, and we assure our readers that the text well sustains the interest excited by the headings, while the liveliness and earnestness of the style will be found pleasant accompaniments of the author's command of his subject. Of the scope and importance of this study Prof. Baldwin well says: "The study of children is generally the only means of testing our mental analysis. If we decide that a certain complex product is due to a union of simpler mental elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the child's mental life are so low in the scale in the matter of instinctive and mental endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under debate which may not be tested by this method." To the questions, what constitutes child study, and why we have so little of it, he replies that only the scientific specialist by the acutest exercise of his discriminative faculty can observe children or experiment upon them with profit. "Back of the question, What did the infant do V is the more difficult question, What did his doing that mean? And how can people who know nothing of the distinction between reflex and voluntary action, or between nervous adaptation and conscious selection, analyze the child's actions and arrive at a true picture of the mental condition that lies back of them? Even Preyer's experiments to determine the order of rise of the child's perceptions of different qualities of color, depending as they did upon word memories, are vitiated by the single fact that speech is acquired long after objects and some colors are distinguished." And if Preyer can thus misinterpret appearances, Prof. Baldwin may well say, "No child's deeds should be given universal value without a critical examination, before which even the most competent psychologist might well quail."

But notwithstanding these warnings, there is a brief popular section written in a somewhat homiletic strain in the chapter on conscious imitation, entitled How to Observe Children's Imitations. He begins with the statement that "nothing less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitation." The observer is told at length that he must take account of the personal influences which have affected the child; its relations to brothers and sisters and to other children, its chums and friendships in the school and home, and especially its games. The section closes with these words: "Finally, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of no use whatever to psychologists—to say nothing of the actual damage you may be to the children—unless you know your babies through and through. Especially the fathers! They are willing to study everything else. They know every corner of the house familiarly except the nursery. A man labors for his children ten hours a day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet he lets their mental growth, the formation of their characters, the evolution of their personality, go on by absorption—if no worse—from common, vulgar, imported, and changing, often immoral, attendants! Plato said the state should train the children, and added that the wisest man should rule the state. . . . We hear a certain group of studies called the humanities, and it is right. But the best school in the humanities for every man is his own house." We have been much impressed by another strain of remark in the same section upon an only child. We have had for some time under our sympathetic observation a little boy whose brothers and sisters are grown, and the truth of the following statement is forcibly brought home to us: "An only child has only adult 'copy.' He can not interpret his father's actions, or his mother's oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in imagination, in brilliancy of fancy. The dramatic in his sense of social situations is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children."