Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/262

242, in which she would be interested by her curiosity, and would take up from the temptation of her special opportunities. Yet M. Taine found that it had not been done. He wished to test Max Müller's views in regard to the genesis of language, and wanted a series of observations of infantine mental growth for the purpose. But they had not been made, the facts were wanting, and nothing remained but to make the study himself. We say this kind of work belongs to woman, and she is perfectly competent to peformperform [sic] it. Why, then, has it not been undertaken, and why has there not grown up a body of carefully-observed and widely-verified facts regarding psychological development in infancy such as would be valuable for arriving at inductive truths for guidance in the rational education of childhood? Undoubtedly, psychology is a backward science, imperfect from the obscurity and complexity of its questions, and its long cultivation by unscientific methods. But the value of observations upon the mental unfolding of infancy is not, by any means, dependent upon the possibility of immediately explaining them. Such observations, if accurately made and intelligently recorded, will have a value of their own independent of the state of psychological science, while they would become a permanent and potent means of its advancement. In most other fields of natural phenomena the facts are far in advance of the theories by which they are organized into science; in the field of mental growth, however, observations are scanty and speculation superabundant.

We are, of course, not to expect that things will come before they are wanted, and, if such observations are not called for, why should they be supplied? But the facts have been long and loudly called for, if not by psychologists, then by practical educators, while woman has had exclusive charge of the education that begins in infancy. She is an educator as a mother, and the culture of childhood has almost universally fallen into her hands as a teacher. We might surely have expected that, with their great excess of opportunity, some few women of ability would have gone carefully and critically and often over the ground which M. Taine has passed over once with such interesting results. But the work that might have been expected, so far as we are aware, has not been done, nor is there any promise of it. The difficulty is, that there has been nothing in woman's education either to interest her in the subject or to qualify her for dealing with it. Observations, to be valuable for scientific purposes, involve an accuracy of perception and an intellectual discrimination which are not to be had except by patient and methodical training of the observing powers. This is the one thing that has not been included in female education. Neither languages, nor mathematics, nor history, nor mental philosophy, nor music, nor general literature, affords any exercise whatever of the observing faculties. A student may become proficient in all these branches, while the intellectual interest in the phenomena of daily experience, and the objects of common life, remains as dormant as it is in the savages. Nay, more, absorption in these modes of mental activity, which involve chiefly the memory and reflective powers, is fatally unfavorable to observation, as it brings the mind under the control of mental habits that exclude it. No woman can make valuable observations on mental progress in infancy that has not had a culture fitted for it, first, by a long practice, such as she gives to music, in independent, observation in some branch of objective science, as botany, for example; and, secondly, by a thorough knowledge of the constitution of the child, especially the functions of its nervous mechanism. With their heads filled with history, æsthetics, algebra,