The Psychology of Childhood
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRELIMINARY. The comparative method of study has commended itself to all the sciences in modern times by its fertility in results, and is now being employed extensively in two principal directions: viz., the analogical and the genetical. The philologist, for example, compares his own language, on the one hand with other languages (in the search for analogies), and on the other avails himself of all manuscripts, inscriptions, etc., which show him his language in its earliest stages, and help him to determine by the operation of what causes, and according to what laws, it has developed from its original crude and inefficient state to its present polished and complicated condition. And similarly with other sciences. In the case of psychology the application of the comparative method has led the investigator t
...o the observation of mental manifestations in the lower animals ; in human beings of morbid or defective mental life, such as the insane, the idiotic, the blind, deaf and dumb ; in peoples of different types of culture, ancient and modern, savage and civilized ; and finally to the study of mental phenomena in their genesis and early development in the life of the child. If the child is only the adult in miniature, and ifsociety is only the individual " writ large," then in studying the infant mind we are approaching a vantage ground from which we may catch a prophetic view, not only of psychological, but also of sociological phenomena. When we compare the young child with the young animal, we cannot fail to be struck by the apparent superiority of the latter over the former, at the beginning of life. The human infant, for example, requires weeks to attain the power of holding his head in equilibrium, while the young chicken runs about and picks up grains of wheat before the... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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