734 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



which it varies its response to the environment. The uncertainties 

 of child psychology, it may be noted, the problem, for example, 

 of the age at which a child first reasons, and the problem of the 

 origin, imitative or spontaneous, of the child's language, belong 

 mainly to the period of infancy when the occurrence and the nature 

 of the child's consciousness must be established by objective tests. 

 The more important domain of child psychology is, on the other 

 hand, the study supplemented by the introspection of the older 

 child of its relatively developed processes of thought, of its real- 

 ized imitations of other people, and of its self-assertive oppositions 

 to them. 



This address has aimed to suggest the scope and the limits of 

 genetic and of comparative psychology. In particular, it has at- 

 tempted: first, to vindicate the right to existence of genetic psych- 

 ology, viewed as a science of developing selves; and second, to 

 formulate and to apply a safe objective test for use in the com- 

 parative study of consciousness. Incidentally, this paper can hardly 

 have failed to show that the experimental method, already so 

 fruitful in psychology, may be employed also to great advantage 

 in the solution of genetic and of comparative problems, provided, 

 first, that it be based on sound conceptions, and second, that it 

 be applied in accordance with the claims of a rigid logic. 



