Development and evolution Author:James Mark Baldwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Comparative Conceptions § I. Recapitulation This way of looking at the two spheres of development and evolution, as involving an application ... more »of the one principle of parallelism, carries with it certain consequences of considerable interest. In the first place, it requires us to carry over into the genetic treatment of psychology the same thorough-going genetic point of view which evolution postulates in biology. And with this goes the question of the application to the facts of the one of the principles already established for the other. The great law of recapitulation at once comes to mind, the law with which we have been having considerable to do in the earlier volumes of this series. If we hold that mind and brain processes are parallel as well in the species as in the individual, and also hold that the brain series in the individual's development recapitulates in the main the series gone through by his species in race descent or evolution; then it follows that the law of recapitulation must hold also for the mental. This has been recognized and the limitations of it have been pointed out in Chap. I. of Mental Development .-1 and a further general application of the idea tothe social life is worked out in the Social and Ethical Interpretations. The further extensions which the theory of biological recapitulation has recently undergone, prominent among which is the theory that regression shows itself first in individuals and afterward in the same directions in the species, should also find confirmation if they be true, or the reverse if they be not true, from the facts of genetic psychology.1 1 In that place, under the topic ' Analogies of Development,' the main ' epochs' of growth in each series, which illustrate the recapitulation of evolution by develop...« less