The recapitulation theory and human infancy

Abstract

The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy a scientific basis for a practical educational program.This could come only with the aid of an exact and faithful interpretation of childhood as it exists in modern societies.Educational schemes based upon historical inferences were therefore necessarily precarious and could easily be found unsound when fairly tested.More especially has the older genetic method of study suffered from the discredit into which some of its guiding principles have fallen.One of these principles was embodied in the theory of recapitulation, the idea that the child in its development rehearses the history of its ancestry, and that in consequence its nature may be inferred from the probable course of human evolution.Taken bodily from embryology, this idea was projected upon the field of mental genesis, where it became a commonplace.More recently disquieting rumors from the source of its origin have been heard to the effect that the principle was formulated without sufficient warrant, and that it cannot be depended upon even as a helpful hypothesis.Its prestige has in consequence been seriously damaged and there is plainly evident great uncertainty as to the degree of truth it may contain.This uncertainty with regard to a principle with important implications for the theory of infancy and psychogenesis, is hardly excusable or necessary.For recourse to the science from which the principle was derived is open, and no obvious reason exists why its real standing there should not be known.If education is to be spared the humiliation which comes inevitably from building on the sand, it must earnestly endeavor solidly to ground its doctrine.Especially is this true when this doctrine is drawn from the pure sciences, for a thorough knowledge of these on the part of outsiders is not easy of attainment and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.Moreover, the position of education is peculiarly difficult, for as an art its practice is not only dependent upon science as such; more than one science is implicated.Education is none the less in duty bound either to acquaint itself with the true value of these borrowed principles or to leave them alone.This paper represents an effort to discover something of the status of recapitulation in biology and to note its implications for the period of infancy.It makes no pretensions to scholarly exhaustiveness.Its justification is the lack of any accessible ' Quoted by Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation, 1903, p. 59.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.