78 The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy 



own which operate without reference to such adaptations. 24 

 Unfortunately a very considerable number of the examples 

 offered for recapitulation in infancy are merely fanciful or even 

 wholly absurd because of a neglect of these obvious logical require- 

 ments. Unless these limitations are acknowledged the ancestral 

 doctrine of childhood becomes meaningless. For if by recapitula- 

 tion or ancestral reference is meant only that the organized and un- 

 acquired part of the mind is due to its history, without regard 

 to a disparity in kind or degree as between infancy and maturity, 

 this is simply equivalent to declaring that the hereditary part 

 of the human mind is inherited, a statement of little descriptive 

 value. That the recapitulationist has done good service in 

 emphasizing the racial character of mind, whether adult or youth- 

 ful, is not questioned. The point at issue is whether infancy is 

 peculiarly ancestral, that is, older than maturity. 



A faithful application of the traditional idea of recapitulation 

 to psycho-physical behavior would mean that as the individual 

 develops it will rehearse in a chronological way the chief stages 

 of psycho-physical evolution in the phylogeny, except as this 

 has been disarranged by direct or cenogenic modifications. 

 There rests upon the advocate of this view, then, the necessity 

 of showing that the sequence of developmental stages is really 

 representative of the racial sequence, and that the constituent 

 phases in the progression are truly homologous with the ancient 

 stages and not merely analogous or convergent phenomena. 



This consistent application of the biological theory has rarely 

 been made to infancy and mental genesis. Recapitulation has 

 taken the form, for instance, of the declaration that the psycho- 

 physical functions appear in the individual in the order of their 

 racial evolution. So stated the doctrine disregards the repre- 

 sentativeness in development of the whole phylogeny. All 

 existing functions may be comparatively recent and many, or 

 even most of them, may have been lost. Those that do appear, 

 however, rise in the phylogenetic order. This view of psycho- 

 physical recapitulation varies from that derived from embryology 

 in another particular, for whereas biological recapitulation 

 assumes that the individual passes through and leaves behind, or 

 radically makes over, its recapitulatory stages in the progression 



« See Bateson, Problems In Genetics, 1913. 



