149.1 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY Copyright, 1907, by G. Stanley Hall PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 600314 PREFACE "The highest study of mankind is man," but we can never know man without knowing the stages of his "father," the child. The wave of interest in child study which swept over this country some three decades ago, and even inundated Europe, was a culture movement of great significance, no matter what value we attribute to its scientific results. It taught us that the child and its characteristic traits are ages older than adulthood, which is a comparatively recent superstructure, and that success in life is far more dependent than we had realized on a happy childhood. Another effect of the movement was to give psychology, which has been slower and more reluctant than even religion to recognize evolution, something of a genetic trend, which has been greatly reinforced of late, at least for a large and important group of scientific minds, by the new conceptions of childhood contributed by the psychoanalysts. The latter, holding that unconscious trends in the soul are really more important than those that are conscious, believe that during the first three or four years of life the foundations of character, not only emotional but volitional and intellectual, are laid, and they practically identify childhood with this larger, stronger, subliminal soul (Das Unbewusste ist das Kindliche). The school and most teachers under our "mass and class system" are eternally prone to look primarily at the subject matter they have to teach and to follow logical methods. Paidology brings a Copernican revolution here, and regarding primarily the nature and needs of the child, considers chiefly the genetic order and gives interest and zest almost the preeminence that the early Christian Church gave to the Holy |