ABSTRACT
This chapter presents discovery, reasoning and thought as these are shown in the pursuit of biological interests, and in the more usual school pursuits, such as arithmetic and mensuration. The relation between maturation and experience is the form to which the ancient quarrel about the relative importance of nature and nurture in development has been reduced in years. Maturation is in the first instance undoubtedly an affair of increase in the depth, breadth and range of synthetic ability, or noetic synthesis. The wide-reaching theoretical views are based upon a wealth of detailed facts as to children’s responses to experimental questions, as well as upon their spontaneous behaviour under certain conditions of observation. Jean Piaget sees the development of mental life in the child as characterised by certain well-marked phases. After the earliest period of “autistic” thinking in infancy, which is immersed in phantasy and at the service of nothing but immediate desire, there follows a long phase of “ego-centrism”.
