Mental development

“ These two aspects, the intellectual, taken in its widest sense, and the moral, are not only of supreme importance, but, as experience shows, they in no wise run parallel courses. For an understanding of mental development in general, therefore, and of the relation of these its aspects, the early conditions of human culture are particularly significant. ”

“ If one thinks that such thoughts do not come to so common a type of mind—that such feelings require a higher mental development—I would urge for their consideration the fact that it is the higher mental development that does away with such thoughts. ”

“ But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go but a little way. The mind hardly begins to awake ere the bodily powers decline—it but becomes dimly conscious of the vast fields before it, but begins to learn and use its strength, to recognize relations and extend its sympathies, when, with the death of the body, it passes away. Unless there is something more, there seems here a break, a failure. ”

“ In any other view of the subject than this, many of the phenomena of childhood would be still more wonderful and inexplicable than they are. One would have supposed, for example, that the imagination—being, as is commonly thought, one of the most exalted and refined of the mental faculties of man—would be one of the latest, in the order of time, to manifest itself in the development of the mind ”

“ It has wrought very much the same changes Studies of mental development in the race and individual. in the treatment of intelligence that it did in the biological sciences. Consciousness is no longer regarded as a fixed set of entities, but as a developmental process. ”

“ If I have seemed at any time to make light of intellectual development, subserving it to intuitional expression, it is only because nineteen-twentieths of the effort of current educational systems is toward mental training to the neglect of those individual potencies which are the first value of each life, and the expression of which is the first purpose of life itself. ”

“ We may say, then, that the higher phases of mental development are characterized by the fact that the situations contain the products of reflective thought, presumably absent in the earlier stages; they are further characterized by a new purpose or end of consciousness, namely, to explain the situations hitherto merely accepted as they are given in presentation or re-presentation; they require deliberate attention to the relationships which hold good among the several elements of successive situations ”

“ Rather let the child grow, expand, mature, according to the law of its own being, giving it only encouragement and example, which are the light and air of mental and moral life. I am not conscious that any one has given us a philosophical, logical system of development, that relates to the physical, intellectual, and moral character ”

“ Great importance attaches, therefore, from the point of view of mental efficiency and stability in adult life, to the influences which control the development of the conative trends during childhood and adolescence. ”

“ The increasing complexity and the increasing inwardness which characterize mental development throughout bring about at last that capacity for and impulse in search of general knowledge which distinguish the adult from the childish mind. ”

“ After all it is but the physiological effect of an educational training, the development of the faculties and the evolution of the imagination; the brain functions in proportion to the progress made in the culture in general, harmonizing with the times, circumstances, and conditions of the period in which we live.
Every age has its turn in the evolution of the mental faculties, and it must go through its stage. ”

“ Among cultural peoples, the child is surrounded by influences inseparable from the processes that arise spontaneously within its own consciousness. Folk psychology, however, in its investigation of the various stages of mental development still exhibited by mankind, leads us along the path of a true psychogenesis. ”

“ Starting with inherited aptitudes, mental development begins in the intercourse of the infant mind with the environment, and, while it is true that there is a sequence of mental experience in each increasing complexity, it is equally true that many kinds of mental action are unfolded together. ”

“ But have we any evidence to throw light on the way in which these several forms originated in the minds of men in the very low condition of mental development which we may suppose to have existed at the time? ”

“ This classification, here roughly indicated and capable of further expansion, will be found in harmony with the 324 results of detailed analysis aided by development. Whether we trace mental progression through the grades of the animal kingdom, through the grades of mankind, or through the stages of individual growth; it is obvious that the advance, alike in cognitions and feelings, is, and must be, from the presentative to the more and more remotely representative. ”

“ This brief sketch of the development as it were by successive impulses, under strong disbelief and discouragement, of a group of mental tendencies, faculties, or sensibilities now recognised as truly existing and as often salutary, is closely paralleled by the development, under similar difficulties, of another group of faculties or sensibilities, whose existence is still disputed, but which if firmly established may prove to be of even greater moment for mankind. ”

“ But a sound physiology and psychology should correspond to Nature. About the best way to test them will be to ascertain how they fit into human nature before it is influenced by any methods whatever, for all methods are liable to hamper and modify. It is hopeful to notice that so many psychologists of the modern school are turning to infant psychology, or the study of the mental development of the very young child, which is of course closely related to its physical development. The behavior of the infant is in accordance with the brain structure and function of which I have been speaking. ”

“ It may bear comparison with one of the great changes in the mental life of the individual man, perhaps rather with the expansion and fixing of the mind which accompanies the passage from infancy into youth, than with the later steps from youth into manhood, or from manhood into old age. ”

“ Once Married, Never Open Your Mind to Any Change. If you keep the door of your purpose closed, evil or even desirable changes cannot make headway without help.
6. Keep Step in Mental Development.—A tree that grows for forty years may take all the sunlight from a tree that stops growing at twenty. ”

“ Interrelation of Physical, Mental and Moral Development. — As to the interrelation of physical, mental and moral development, it must never be forgotten that the mind and the body must be studied together, 5 and that this is particularly true in considering the mind in management. 6 For the best results of the mind, the body must be cared for, and provided for, fully as much as must the mind, or the best results from the mind will not, and cannot, be obtained. ”

“ Here the natural sciences — in the strict sense of the word "natural" — may be evoked to tell of the physical conditions, under which the genesis and development of mental life takes place. But we make a very meagre, an unnecessarily meagre, use of the principle of development, if we fail to apply it directly to mental life itself. ”

“ The attainment of this knowledge and the development of this faculty are evidently the goal of human intellectual development. This it is which has insured progress and raised man ever higher above the brutes.
Before we can proceed to the study of the will we must clearly recognize and define certain modes of mental and nervous action, which sooner or later manifest themselves in muscular activity. For, while certain of our bodily activities are clearly voluntary, others take place wholly, or in part independently, of the individual will. ”

“ GET AWAY FROM THE CROWD WHEN YOU CAN. KEEP YOURSELF TO YOURSELF, IF ONLY FOR A FEW HOURS DAILY. —— Full individual growth, special development, rounded mental operations—all these demand room, separation from others, solitude, self-examination and the self-reliance which solitude gives. ”

“ Few persons who have not specially reflected on this subject, or examined closely the operations of their own minds, are aware what an extended influence the images thus stored in the mind in childhood have in forming the basis, or furnishing the elements of the mental structures of future life. ”

“ Byways in human development, both emotional and intellectual, Abnormalities of development at different levels may diverge from the main track at various points in its course—some near its origin in the infantile strata of the mind, some at a later stage of progress. ”

“ Immaturity, maturity—the difference is only of degree; the child is father to the man; the psychology we trace in child life is fundamentally the same that obtains when the individual achieves that self-control and balance, that steadiness of aim, that harmonious union of bodily and mental powers which characterize maturity. Until we understand this merging and blending of experiences that make up a life history, we may regard as trivial the fleeting events and memories of childhood which the psychologist knows are significant and far-reaching. ”

“ Stronger far than education—going on before education can commence, possibly from the very first moments of consciousness, we begin to impress ourselves on our children. Our character, voice, features, qualities—modified, no doubt, by entering into a new human being, and into a different organization—are impressed upon our children. Not the inculcation of opinions, but much rather the formation of principles, and of the tone of character, the derivation of qualities. Physiologists tell us of the derivation of the mental qualities from the father, and of the moral from the mother. ”

“ Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.
It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences. ”

“ When we think of ourselves we should apply the same rule, and we should apply it universally in all physical, mental and spiritual training. The child that is trained in this manner from birth will naturally become extraordinary. ”

“ The world of the inner processes which accompany the higher forms of nervous development in human beings is capable of unlimited growth and it is capable of this by a process of becoming external: it becomes external, and, as it were, perpetuates itself in language, literature, science and art, legislation, society, and the like. ”

“ However, the life that children live gives exercise to all fundamental functions of the mind, and unless some of the children tested have had experience which would tend to develop some mental functions in a special way, tests of the various aspects of learning capacity, memory, association, imagination, etc., are a fairly good measure of original, inherited tendencies. ”

“ I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the [pg 120] genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. ”

“ We have now before us unquestionable evidence that in the growing child there is a power, not only of forming, but of expressing a pre-conceptual judgment, long before there is any evidence of the child presenting the faintest rudiment of internal, conceptual, or true self-consciousness. ”

“ It is now time to explore more carefully some of the more important of these byways into which the human mind may wander in the course of its development—byways which we have hitherto passed unnoticed, or at most examined with a hasty glance, as we traced the direct path of emotional development from childhood to maturity. ”

“ Thus psychology—properly interpreted as the study of the evolution of mental functions—at once appraises the value of mental traits, and in recovering the trade-routes of the past, points to the most profitable highways of the future. Psychology of this type and temper remains the supreme guide of education. ”

“ This is a quite different thing from the notion of a small and feeble measure of heart and intellect in the child, to grow by degrees into the robust and noble spiritual development which, according to the psychical evolutionist, should distinguish the adult human being. ”

“ Moreover if the duty of keeping his word were not established in the child's mind by its own utility, the child's growing consciousness would soon impress it on him as a law of conscience, as an innate principle, only requiring suitable experiences for its development. ”

“ Any normal child delights in the exercise of all its faculties and instincts and feelings—whether they be of the heart and the soul, or the body and the brain. This is the natural method of their [Pg 289] growth. And the ideal individual would be one in whom all these sides had reached their fullest development, in a perfectly balanced whole.
The vast majority of things which interest children and which they naturally like and seek to do are unconsciously in line with this endeavor. They all give exercise to some quality which is useful and proper to human nature. ”