G. Stanley Hall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The genetic method rests on a single conviction: that we truly know a thing only when we can trace its development from the farthest beginning through all its stages to maximal maturity and decay.1 To know the mind, then, is not to dissect it at a single moment, as the old introspective psychology did, but to follow it through time — through the life of the individual, through the history of the race, through the comparative study of lower forms of life and of children, gathering data from the collation of the varied inner and outer experiences of many minds besides one's own.2
The psychologist who confines himself to the adult, educated, European consciousness has taken a cross-section of a river and mistaken it for the river itself. The method demands, therefore, that we go to school to the folk-soul, to criminals and defectives, to animals — for the soul is best known when we can write its history in the world, and there are no finalities save formulae of development.3
The deepest radicals of psychic life — hunger, love, pride, pleasure and pain — strike their roots into phylogenetic strata far below anything a single human life can illuminate, and they must be studied objectively and by careful observational methods precisely because introspection alone cannot reach them.4 The genetic psychologist uses introspection where it serves, reinforced and perfected by experiment, but finds it necessary, almost in exact proportion as his work becomes fundamental, to move freely up and down the phyletic scale.5
This is also why I held that the child and the race are each keys to the other.6 The child recapitulates, in his growth, epochs of ancestral experience; and the stages of racial history, read in reverse, illuminate what the child is passing through. I was always candid that the recapitulation principle, as applied to psychogenesis, has limitations and qualifications — the biologic field itself had already taught me that — and I never claimed more finality for our conclusions than the evidence warranted, save in cases involving physical measurements.7
The questionnaire studies, the bibliographies, the mass collection of cases: all of it was preliminary, suggestive, a first stage, and I said so plainly.8 What the method opened, and what no merely logical or introspective psychology could open, is a natural history of the mind — stages of development that are real, that have an order, that can be known empirically.9
Growth itself is non-logical and forever inconsistent with itself; logic follows after achievement and discovery, it never guided a new step.10 The genetic psychologist does not deduce the mind from first principles; he traces it, as Darwin traced species, by the patient accumulation of evidence from every quarter where the mind's history has left a record.
We really know things only when we trace their development from the farthest beginning through all their stages to maximal maturity and decay.Adolescence Vol 2
the genetic psychologist, while he must use introspection in the old way, or reenforced and perfected by experimental methods wherever they serve his purpose, will find it necessary, almost in exact proportion as his work becomes fundamental, to gather his data empirically from the comparative study of lower forms of life and of children and from the collation of the varied inner and outer experiences of many minds besides his own.Adolescence Vol 2
We must go to school to the folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives, animals, and in some sense go back to Aristotle in rebasing psychology on biology, and realize that we know the soul best when we can best write its history in the world, and that there are no finalities save formulae of development.Adolescence Vol 1
These radicals of man's psychic life, while some of them are decadent, rudimentary, and superseded, are often important just in proportion to the depth of the phylogenetic strata into which they strike their roots. Hunger, love, pride, and many other instinctive feelings, to say nothing of pleasure and pain, can be traced far down through the scale of vertebrate and to invertebrate life. It is plain, for these reasons, that they must be studied objectively and by careful observational methods.Adolescence Vol 2
the genetic psychologist, while he must use introspection in the old way, or reenforced and perfected by experimental methods wherever they serve his purpose, will find it necessary, almost in exact proportion as his work becomes fundamental, to gather his data empirically from the comparative study of lower forms of life and of children.Adolescence Vol 2
Holding that the child and the race are each keys to the other, I have constantly suggested phyletic explanations of all degrees of probability.Adolescence Vol 1
Realizing the limitations and qualifications of the recapitulation theory in the biologic field, I am now convinced that its psychogenetic applications have a method of their own, and although the time has not yet come when any formulation of these can have much value, I have done the best I could with each instance as it arose.Adolescence Vol 1
Of course studies of this sort have their very grave defects of method. We always strove to recognize that they were only preliminary or first stages, that their chief value lay in their suggestiveness, and that little finality should be claimed for our conclusions save in those cases involving physical measurements.Life and Confessions of a Psychologist
Thus, too, our ideals of what the most perfect knowledge of any fact or object really is, are coming to be more and more genetic.Adolescence Vol 2
Growth, on the other hand, is essentially non-logical and forever inconsistent with itself. The logic of the schools is ex post facto. It follows after achievement and discovery, and at best tells a little of how mind has achieved its triumphs in the past, warns of errors, but it never either guided or inspired new steps.Adolescence Vol 2