uenced by
calculation and duplicity and adult reserve. There is around every one
of us adults a web of convention and prejudice of our own making. Not
only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus
lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, but each of us
builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality with
himself. We are subject, as Bacon said, not only to "idols of the
forum," but also to "idols of the den."

The child, on the contrary, has not learned his own importance, his
pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not
observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time,
place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor
the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex
accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness.

2. The study of children is often the only means of testing the truth
of our analyses. If we decide that a certain mental state is due to a
union of simpler elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of
child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so
enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the
child's mental life are so low in the scale, in the matter of mental
endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under
debate in psychology which may not be tested by this method.

At this point it is that child psychology is more valuable than the
study of the mind of animals. The latter never become men, while
children do. The animals represent in some few respects a branch of
the tree of growth in advance of man, while being in many other
respects very far behind him. In studying animals we are always
haunted by the fear that the analogy from him to man may not hold;
that some element essential to the development of the human mind may
not be in the animal at all. Even in such a question as the
localization of the functions of the brain described later on, where
the analogy is one of comparative anatomy and only secondarily of
psychology, the monkey presents analogies with man which dogs do not.
But in the study of children we may be always sure that a normal child
has in him the promise of a normal man.

3. Again, in the study of the child's mind we have the added advantage
of a corresponding simplicity on the bodily side; we are able to take
account of the physiological processes at a time when they are
r