716 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



emphasises this " failure of natural selection. " Those who could 

 not unaided, win in the struggle for existence, are cherished and 

 protected, by parental care, by philanthropic effort, or by religious 

 zeal, in opposition to the workings of natural selection. 1 



Development, in its well-marked biological sense, is then im- 

 possible within the domain of related selves. It is important to 

 reiterate this conclusion, in the face of the cheap and easy theories 

 of transmission of traits, and of natural selection working in the 

 sphere of social relations. But development is not necessarily con- 

 ceived after the fashion of modern biology. 2 In a broad sense, de- 

 velopment may be defined as the succession of the more complex 

 upon the simpler states or, conversely, of the simpler upon the 

 more complex states of a unitary being. Such a psychic develop- 

 ment the normal adult self, who remembers his own past experience, 

 may introspectively observe in himself. 



Genetic psychology, thus conceived, is evidently in the first in- 

 stance individual psychology: it is a study of the individual self 

 human or animal, child or adult either in the process of learn- 

 ing, that is, in the progress from simple to complex consciousness, 

 or in the reverse order from complex to simple. This learning-con- 

 sciousness, as will later appear, is of two chief sorts: individual 

 and social. That is to say, a developing self either profits mainly 

 by its own experience, without realized relation to other selves; 

 or it learns by its attitude, imitative or inventive, toward these 

 other selves. 3 Each of these basal forms of learning individual 

 and social has, in turn, two subdivisions. The individual learn- 

 ing-consciousness either is mainly associative, or it involves analytic 

 reasoning. And the social type of learning, by imitation and opposi- 

 tion, is distinguished as it refers to contemporary or to past selves. 

 In the latter case, genetic psychology may indeed be called a race- 

 psychology. The child imitates its parents, and the parents have 

 learned by imitation of an earlier generation, each imitation involv- 

 ing an allied invention, a supplementing of the copy. Material for 

 a genetic race-psychology is found thus, in the indirect dependence 

 of an individual, through imitative and inventive consciousness, on 

 other individuals who, from the time-standpoint, have preceded. 

 Most of these distinctions will be illustrated, in the second section of 

 this paper. 4 



1 Cf. F. T. Headley, Problems of Evolution, pp. 282 seq., 334; L. T. Hobhouse, 

 Mind in Evolution, chap, xiv, pp. 387 seq. and 395. 



2 Cf Hobhouse, op. cit., pp. 375 seq., 383, seq. 



3 Cf. J. M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, chap, viii, sec. 4; 

 J. Royce, Psychological Review, 1898, pp. 113 seq. 



4 Genetic psychology must be sharply distinguished from the study of the 

 psycho-physical organism in its development. The unit of this sort of develop- 

 ment is neither psychical nor physical, but a compound of psychical and physical.- 

 In the current phrase, this compound is known as the psycho-physical organism : 

 it is the body regarded as possessed of a soul, or self, or the self regarded as the 



