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 VII. GENERAL LAW OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. MONG the things that lay doubtful claims to the rank of a science is Education. The doubt is not raised with regard to the character of the thing itself, but with regard to our understanding and treatment of it. As before stated, a science is formulated in laws bound together in one system by some general organic law. But our understanding of the laws of mental development is so wanting in unity and consistency, that however certain we may be of many of the laws of mental growth, we have not related these laws together in an organic whole. The first step to be taken is the development of a General Law. 2. Before we can formulate a law we must find a principle, and before we can formulate a General Law of mental development we must find a principle that runs through all the changes by which development is secured. If we can find such a principle, we may be able to trace a General Law, and arrange the facts and known laws of education under it in some systematic or scientific manner. 3. Education has been defined as the process of developing the forms of reflective consciousness, and consciousness has been defined as the predication of being and identity. The growth of consciousness, then, is growth in the predication of these two elements. The predication of identity is impossible without the predication ofbeing, but the predication of being could never constitute growth. Were it possible for us to be conscious of any number of existences, there could be no development of consciousness without an act binding these states of consciousness together. Successive predications of the same thing, existence, would pass through the mind as waters flow down a river, and leave no product of growth. It is only when two different ...