ABSTRACT
"Child psychology" became a field for systematic research towards the close of the nineteenth century. But its development might well be traced from the Renaissance and the humanistic interest in children. One might note evidences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the child was coming into his rights as an individual, as something more than an incomplete man or woman. In the seventeenth century Comenius published a picture book for children. 1 A trend of considerable significance for the purpose of understanding the origin of child psychology was the educational movement (p. 50) associated with the names of Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Education began to mean the free development of the child's abilities. This was closely related to the apotheosis of all that was "natural," and to the doctrine of laissez-faire. Education was to be a means of enabling the child to attain his own latent selfhood and capacities. The first intensive study of the child came in this period, in the biographical observations of childish growth recorded by Tiedemann. 2 Though the educational contributions of Froebel and Herbart intervened, no marked advance in child psychology was made for over fifty years. A few works of importance were written about the middle of the nineteenth century. But it was not until experimental physiology and the evolutionary movement began to bring their forces to bear that child psychology came into its own. Darwin himself made a direct contribution through the publication of a series of observations entitled "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant." 3 Taine 4 offered a similar sketch.
