Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes

The book really represents, therefore, five years of very close work; and the distribution of the topics over this period accounts for the fact that the chapters, in many instances, include in more or less modified form articles which I have contributed to the reviews. It will now be clear that all were written in the course of development of one intellectual impulse, and so have their only adequate presentation and justification in this volume. I am indebted to the editors and publishers of certain journals for this present use of some of the material, e.g., Mind, The Philosopliical Review, The Psychological Review, The American Journal of Psychology, The Popular Sciettce Monthly, The Century Magazine, Science, The Educational Review. There are certain other great provinces, besides, which I find capable of fruitful exploration with the same theoretical principles. Of course, genetic psychology ought to lay the only solid foundation for education, both in its method and its results. And it is equally true, though it has never been adequately realized, that it is in genetic theory that social or collective psychology must find both its root and its ripe fruitage. We have no social psychology, because we have had no doctrine of the socius. We have had theories of the ego and the alter ; but that they did not reveal the socius is just their condemnation. So the theorist of society and institutions has floundered in seas of metaphysics and biology, and no psychologist has brought him a life-preserver, nor even heard his cry for help.…