Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    quacy a far-reaching, although not incredible or impossible, assumption — viz., that the tendency of pleasure, through the medium of its physical accompaniments, to heighten for the moment the activities of the framework in general, somehow finds a way to concentrate upon the specific move- ment adapted to the precise case \i.e., adapted to bring the organism into continued relation to the pleasure-giving stimulus]. This is a very large demand in itself and would seem to need a large number of chance experiments [or a congenital variation producing a bifurcate division of move- ments into 'expanding' and 'contracting' respectively] be- fore the lucky coincidence is reached. The hypothesis is by no means impossible ... its natural place is under the hypothesis of Evolution, where it is an important, if not indispensable, item. ^ We now find ourselves introduced to another class of facts, which, when interpreted, lead us to another funda- mental innovation in the theory of adaptation. It is evident that we have been dealing with the ques- tion of ontogenetic adaptation so far, the question as to how the individual organism manages to get new adapta- tions. Later on I shall ask how the fact of heredity can secure the preservation for the species of the adaptations secured by the individual. But when we come to view the general fact of race adaptation as a whole, the ques- 1 I think it well to say that Professor Bain in a private letter wrote me that he was taking account of my article on 'Imitation' in Mind (January, 1894). As he makes no reference, however, to my paper in his book, I may be wrong in thinking this to be a passage in which he had my article in view. I may even be wrong in thinking that the 'hypothesis' he speaks of is capable of being interpreted in the way I have in the additions made by me in brackets in the text. In that case, the quotation may be read simply as a further exposition of my own views put largely in Professor Bain's words.
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