The Mental Development of the Child

A Summary of Modern Psychological Theory

Karl Buhler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415868839
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136313073
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume VI of thirty-two in the Developmental Psychology series. First published in 1930, this study presents a summary of the psychological theory of the time, on the mental development of a growing child considering memory, development of perception, imagination, ability to draw and evolution.

THE MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD

CHAPTER ONE

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

1.—INSTINCT, TRAINING, AND INTELLECT

A CHAPTER FROM COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

ONE can speak in different senses of the developmental course of the mind, but here we are thinking of what is reflected in the growing child: entering the world more helpless than mostanimals, entirely passive and as yet devoid of all mental activity, it stands before us, three years later, athinking being that has far surpassed all animals. Very far surpassed, for it speaks a human language, passesjudgments, draws conclusions, has some idea—however primitive and imperfect—of the world, and takes up a tentative attitude towards the true and the false, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. This humanization of the child constitutes our theme.

Occasionally, however, it will be profitable to extend the scope somewhat and to compare thedevelopment of the individual with the history of the species, with the history of mankind. The language and art, the conception of the world, the conduct of life of the older generation into which the child grows, oncehad their beginning too; once there must have been an early and an earliest ‘childhood’ of humanity in which human language, drawing on clay and stone, music and plastic art were developed; and astill more remote time when man first created tools.

We know very little about these primitive times and yet a resigned “ignorabimus” would be premature; for the science of prehistory has not yet exhausted its best source of information, nor yet indeed in many respects succeeded in recognizing it. This source, I feel convinced, is the mental development of our children. We are beginning to see, e.g., in the language and drawing of children, certain fundamental laws of mental progress manifesting themselves quite independently of external influences, lawswhich, as they govern the evolution of childhood, in like manner presumably governed that of prehistory. Whoever formulates them correctly will be able to render very valuable service to prehistory, or at least to put forward fruitful questions. We shall discuss details at a later stage.

But more important for our purposes is the ultimate enlargement of our point of view: man isnot isolated in the world, but is related to the animals. On examining all significant, i.e. (objectively) purposeful modes of behaviour displayed by man and animals, we find a very simple and obvious structure consisting of three great stages in ascending order; these three stages are called instinct, training and intellect. As matters stand to-day, instinct is the lowest stage and at the same time the soil from which all the higher ones grow. Even in man there is no field or form of mental activity which is not in some way based on theinstincts. It is true that in former times, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers were a little too free with special terms. The sociologist used to speak of a ‘social instinct’ and an ‘instinct of property’ in man, the philologist of an ‘instinct of communication’ and other students attributed to man religious, ethical, æsthetic instincts. It almost seemed as if these thinkers imagined the new-born child as an ambassador entering life with a bundle of complete programmes. It was only too easy to criticize so crude a conception of instinct, for human instincts are undoubtedly not so clearly defined and determined. But the underlying assumption that the highest forms of the mind, society, law, language, art and religion, are intimately dependent on instincts is not thereby refuted. But let us first endeavour to get our minds clear on the fundamental concepts.

(a) What is instinct? A chicken, as soon as it has left the shell, runs about, picks up grains, and drinks water after the fashion of fowls; a duckling on the first day of its life swims and divesto perfection. No one has shown the animals how to do these things; no useful or harmful experiences have gonebefore; we call it instinctive behaviour. There are animals whose life consists entirely, or almost entirely, of such events, viz., the insects and other invertebrates. I shall take as a simple example the well-known ant-lions, larvae of a certain group of neuroptera, because they have recently been subjected to a very thorough study.¹ At the bottom of a sandpit with steep sides, which it has dug itself, the tiny robber conceals himself, buried up to the head. With its strong, sharp-edged jaws it is not unlike a stag-beetle, though no bigger than a large ant. As soon as an ant or a little spider strays on to the edge of the pit and falls down its steep sides, the ant-lion’s jaws close with a snap. If the victim is able to get a hold half-way up and starts to climb out, the danger is not past, for the ant-lion hurls grains of sand with great force against its victim and generally succeeds in bringing it down. Once it is caught, its blood is slowly sucked out. In a good, profitable hole of this kind the ant-lion will stay for months, i.e., during practically the whole of itslarval existence. It is only when no victims arrive and hunger drives it, or when from other circumstances living conditions are no longer favourable, that it leaves the pit and crawls towards light, warmth and dryness, until it has found a suitable new place where it again digs itself in. This is undoubtedly “sensible,” i.e., purposive behaviour, and yet it consists, as Doflein has shown quite clearly, of a very small number of simple reflexes. In an experiment the animal behaves almost like an automaton. It is practically ready to begin as soon as it leaves the egg and alters little during its life. Once one knows the few factors in question, one can always say in any situation what will happen, and can produce any meaningless actions one desires. There are good reasons, nevertheless, for assuming that it is not a pure reflex-automaton; butthat is a different matter.

In such examples the properties of pure instinctive actions can be most readily observed: that from the beginning such acts are carried out with considerable perfection without previous practice, that they are cut out for certain conditions of life and these only, that they occur uniformly in all individuals of a species, etc., in short, that they are a ready-for-use inheritance of modes of behaviour set going in a definite way according to a preformed natural plan. It is true that matters are not everywhere so simple and obvious as in the case of the ant-lion; among the instincts are found extraordinarily complicated activities of which it cannot be predicted what factors are at work until more exact experiments have been performed. Biology is at present hard at work trying to separate the simple factors from the complex ones. When once these are known as well as the constituent parts of the animal body, a very great deal will have been gained. But there are cases, particularly among the higher animals, where it is difficult, if not impossible, to say how much of a given performance is due to instinct and how much to training or, when the possibility of it arises at all, how much to intellect; this overlapping is part of the problem and does not affect the validity of our conceptual distinction of three stages.

The psychologist is not at present able to say much about the instincts.¹ Whether there is something akin to a soul in them which governs and co-ordinates reflexes, whether the insects, e.g., have feeling and sensation at all and how they “feel” before, during and after an act, are all questions that cannot be answered offhand to-day. There is, as much justification for the assumption that insects are richly endowed with desires, emotions, etc., as for the contrary assumption that their conscious life has not yet progressed anything like as far. I think we ought to hold only to the view that nature never makessuperfluous provision, never gives consciousness where it can be dispensed with in a group without prejudicing its existence. Belief in a consciousness which, like the phenomenon of the day of rest, exists side by side with mechanical events without exerting any influence on them, flies in the face of all biological doctrine. Possibly, the most universal facts of organic being (growth, propagation, regeneration) demand the supposition of a mind-like factor in all life, ² nevertheless the question as to the functions of consciousness is so obscure that, for the time being, we must leave it quite out of account in our doctrine of instincts.

This being so, we must simply content ourselves with looking at things from the outside. Instincts have an extremely conservative character; they function with extraordinary certainty and precision where everything remains unaltered, and fail when the individual enters upon new conditions of existence. Naturally they once had to come into being too, and were not exempt from change, but this only came about in the course of and at the cost of many generations.

(b) Training. Nature has accomplished marvellous things with instincts, but there were definite limits here, and further development has taken place along different lines. The inflexibility of instinct was broken down more and more and the individual became capable of adapting himself to the special conditions of his environment, became capable of learning. The first step in this direction is called associative memory, or in other words, training. A young dog has the instinct to hunt, but by no means always sticks to one unchanging method in its hunting. The dog learns to exploit new possibilities, as every huntsman knows. In order to break an animal in properly, one starts off from the instincts it has already, So, e.g., a dog reacts by nature to traces of smell, pursues a living animal and brings back in its jaws the booty it has captured. It is with this capital of instinctive modes of behaviour that training works, by suppressing some, accentuating others and forming new combinations. When a setter gets near the hiding game, he has to keep still until the hunter has rustled it and brought it down. That is opposed to the dog's primitive method of hunting, and its desire to leap on to the hunted animal must be suppressed by training; or if a certain breed of dog has inherited the acquired property of setting, this must be intensified by training. We can see that the dog's unwearying zeal for hunting is an enhancement, and that retrieving is a combination, of original modes of behaviour (carrying off the booty and returning to the master).

The human trainer deals in reward and punishment and thereby merely imitates what nature shows him, for in its wild state the animal also learns by success and failure. Take as an example the hen at the garden fence. At first she will run up and down restlessly in front of the obstacle until by chance she lights upon a suitable opening. The second, third, fifth time the hen behaves no differently, but when the same process is repeated a few dozen times, she gradually reaches the goal more quickly and eventually avoids useless routes altogether, by making straight for the hole. Frequent success has given this particular mode of behaviour an advantage, failure has suppressed the others: a clear, unequivocal and sufficiently definite connection between certain sense-impressions, and the successful mode of behaviour has now been established. One speaks of the ‘pleasure of success’ and the ‘unpleasure of failure,’ but thereby oversteps the bounds even of the purely external (‘objective ‘) method of approach, though, it is true, at a theoretically harmless point. If for the term ‘feelings,’ which we ourselves would experience in similar situations, is substituted anything else causally connected with success and failure, which can explain the opposite effects on memory, the difficulty is removed.

It is easily seen that for training (in its purest, primitive form) an ‘overproduction of movements’, a ‘trying-out’, is necessary so that there may be a certain amount of play for chance, which, as in throwing repeatedly at a goal or shooting with a shot-gun, is always to some extent concerned in exact successes. By forming a definite connection the amount of play which is left to chance is then gradually narrowed down and eventually excluded altogether. Thus a state is reached that might be compared to the instincts in respect of the fewness of the means employed and the sureness and precision of the achievement; a state that can hardly be distinguished from a condition in which instincts alone are active, unless one knows its previous history. At this point we must approach the matter from an evolutionary point of view. (See §4 below.)

Trainableness is a property which has evolved to a fair degree of perfection only in the vertebrates. However, ants, bees and crayfish are susceptible to certain simple forms of training. How far fleas can really be trained, as it is said they can, I have never been able to determine satisfactorily. Fishes get accustomed to a particular feeding-place and gradually learn to avoid obstacles of a very simple kind, as in the case of the pike and the glass plate put in its pond. But that is not much. Nor do frogs and snakes belong to the animals readily able to learn. On the other hand many birds, such as falcons and parrots, can accomplish considerable feats and even the good old stupid hen can do a little. If out of a long row of grains of corn on a board every second grain is glued down, the hungry hen will at first go on pecking even at the ones she cannot pick up, but will gradually abandon these unsuccessful attempts and learn to take regularly only every second grain. The lesson is learnt so thoroughly that later on one need not glue down any of the grains, for the hen will only pick up every second one. The hen is even capable of this: one can glue every third grain; after long training she learns to pick up always two and leave the third untouched.¹ Similarly it is said that if one takes some of the kittens from a cat's litter while the mother is away, leaving only one or two, on returning she immediately sets out to look for the missing ones, but if there are still three left, she does not miss any. That may be true: I do not know. Uncritical persons, who in psychological matters never hesitate to set up sweeping theories, would probably draw the conclusion that cats and hens can count up to three, but no further. No, such summary, simple explanations are no longer tolerated in animal psychology. As we shall see later in the case of the child, far more is necessary for real counting, for forming concepts of number, than the animals achieve here. Cats and hens can probably count neither up to three, nor up to two, nor—what is far more difficult—to one. But of this we shall have more to say later. Here we are concerned merely with the question of training. As I have mentioned, falcons, trained for hunting, and parrots, which can be taught to utter quite passably words and whole sentences, can accomplish more than hens. Mammals—we need only mention the horse, the elephant, the dog and the higher apes—go considerably further than birds. This course of development is unmistakably bound up with the rise of the cerebral cortex, or, put more accurately, with the increased differentiation of certain quite definite regions of the cortex, known, on account of their probable function, as the association centres.

Man marches at the head of all the vertebrates. No other creature has to learn so much during life as he. Even if we leave out of account the multiplication table, the vocabularies of foreign languages and whatever else school and culture in general involve, this proposition holds good. Just think of what is necessary in order to learn the mother tongue, be this the most primitive of human languages known ! And more still: man must acquire in the games of his earliest youth bodily dexterity, including grasping and all the most elementary manipulations. This training begins at once, in the first weeks of his life, when nature herself is his teacher. Later, adults who want to make the child one of them, take a hand; and finally the adolescent and the grown man, realizing the necessity for it and of their own free will, train themselves in all manner of ways. Every sports club has its ‘trainers.’ Every art, every trade, every science presupposes a certain fundamental knowledge which has to be mechanically acquired—and this, in principle, is simply training as we have defined it.

Another consideration: for animals capable of a higher degree of training, for those animals with ‘plastic’ dispositions that can be moulded, nature has provided, in order to prepare them fully for the earnestness of life, a period of de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Table
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustration
• Preface
• Chapter I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
• Chapter II. THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE
• Chapter III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERCEPTIONS
• Chapter IV. MEMORY AND IMAGINATION OF THE CHILD
• Chapter V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAWING: SUMMARY OF THE LITERATURE
• Chapter VI. THE EVOLUTION OF THINKING
• Chapter VII. SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
• Endnotes
• Index