396 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS, 



the earliest development of the ego. The first value to the child of the physical (as 

 against the social) world is as a canvas upon which to project his personal wishes and 

 anxieties ; his first form of interest in it is one of dramatic representation. And 

 dramatic make-believe play helps to lessen inner tension arising from the earliest 

 anxieties, and so to free the child's interest for real events and real objects. 

 Imaginative play buUds a bridge by which the child can pass from the symbolic 

 values of things to active inquiry into their objective characters. 



It may well be that the most significant difference between children of different 

 ages is to be found in the direction of their interests. 



(3) The third relation falls strictly within the field of cognition itself. The child's 

 ability to evoke the past selectively and appropriatelj' in imaginative play seems to 

 be closely connected with the growth of his power to evoke the future in constructive 

 hypothesis, and to develop the consequences of 'ifs.' In his make believe he takes 

 the first steps towards that emancipation of meanings from the here and now which 

 makes hypothesis possible. 



III. The mechanisms of the child's phantasy (' ego-centric ' and ' syncretistic 

 thought ') must be distinguished from his txne judgments. 



Make-believe is neither an hallucination nor a phobia. The child's ' magic ' and 

 ' omnipotence ' are not fixed as organised systems of belief ; they are strictly an affair 

 of feeling and phantasy. Relational thought and true belief slowly emerge from this 

 matrix of feeling and phantasy under the cumulative pressure of experience. 



Presidential Address by Prof. C. W. Valentine on The Foundations 

 of Child Psychology, and their Bearing on some Problems of General 

 Psychology. (See p. 176.) 



Afternoon. 

 Mr. R. W. PiCKFORD. — Some Effects of Style and Rhythm in Reading. 



Subjective observations have been collected in order to study problems of interest 

 both in general psychology and in the special branch of reading. Two series of 

 extracts selected from general literature, twelve in the first and nine in the second, 

 were read, for the most part aloud, by eighteen subjects, of both sexes, who gave 

 introspective reports after each reading. One of the extracts is quoted in illustration, 

 and three of the series of introspections upon it are given too, for the same purpose. 



In a note on the psychological standpoint adopted it is pointed out that the mind 

 is conceived as a system of activities or processes, and the object of psychology as 

 that of tracing their functional relationships. The terms ' conflict ' and ' solution ' 

 are used to refer to specially differing modes of functional organisation : conflict 

 occurs when activities are not in harmonious integration ; solution when they are. 



Style is regarded as psychologically distinct from rhythm, being more closely 

 connected with meaning — in the sense ' cognitive synthesis ' — than it, and having 

 relative functional independence. A confused style may give rise to emotional or 

 unemotional conflicts ; contempt and vituperation are interesting defence -systems 

 which may be linked with the former class. Discord between style and idea expressed 

 is also a source of conflict ; which, here again, may have either emotional or intellectual 

 qualities in dominant degree. 



Solution may be brought about by style in an unwitting manner, that is, one 

 which defies the subject's powers of analysis : clarity favours solution, and it may be 

 recognised as such, or function through pleasant feeUng-tone. In the highest order 

 of styles there is an organic harmonj'^ with the matter expressed : when this exists 

 the complete apprehension of a piece involves the threefold synthesis of the subject's 

 preconceptions, the language-form — that is, the style and rhythm, and the ideas 

 expressed by the author in his writing. Various incomplete degrees of such a sj'nthesis 

 have been observed. 



In this paper metre is treated as a special case of rhythm ; and their relationship is 

 not further analysed. Rhythm may give rise to conflict owing to the failure of the 

 systems involved in the subjective organisation of the rhythm Itself to combine with 

 the cognitive processes : on the other hand, the disturbance due to the rhythm may 

 be independent of the cognitive synthesis. Several modes of these conflicts arc 

 discussed in brief. 



