James Sully, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
If we would understand the mind, we should watch it in the making, and it is making itself before our eyes in every nursery. The child is not a small adult but a mind in growth, and its perceptions, its first words, its drawings, its play, its dawning moral sense, and not least its charming errors, are the living record of how intelligence is built.
I have gathered such observations — my own, and those of watchful parents and teachers — and studied them with sympathy and care, for the method proper to this subject is patient observation of the child as it is, not the imposition upon it of the adult's categories. This study is at once a science and a practical art: it lays bare the natural order of mental growth, and it teaches the educator to follow that order rather than to force the young mind against its grain.
To observe children lovingly and exactly is to read the first chapters of the history of every human mind, and to learn how that mind may best be nourished.12345
In many of these statistical inquiries, moreover, a certain amount of introspective work is imposed on a young mind wholly untrained in this difficult art, and, we may add, likely to suffer morally by being required to carry it out. If, on the other hand, the inquiries are answered by young persons who have emerged from the state of childhood, we have, it is clear, to do with all the uncertainties of memory.The Teachers Handbook of Psychology, pp. 9–10
Now this work of child-study is not an easy one which anybody can rashly take up. It requires, for one thing, special personal aptitudes and tastes, a warm interest in children, the preservation of a child-like spirit to which nothing childish is alien, and a quick sympathetic imagination.The Teachers Handbook of Psychology, pp. 7–8
Conversely one may feel pretty sure that a woman who retains a vivid memory of her childish ideas and feelings will be drawn to the companion- ship of children. After reading their autobiographies one hardly needs to be told that Goethe carried into old age his quick responsiveness to the gaiety of the young heart; and that George Sand when grown old was never so happy as when gathering the youngsters about her.Studies of Childhood, pp. 16–17
It may be, as we shall see by-and-by, that the baby's mind is not so perfectly simple, so absolutely primitive as it at first looks. Yet it is the simplest type of human consciousness to which we can have access.Studies of Childhood, pp. 7–8
W. Brown, Teacher of Psychology in State Normal School,Worcester, Mass., with introduction by E.H. Russell, Principal: reprinted from the Pedagogical Seminary). Many of the quaint sayings noted down lose much of their psychological point from our complete ignorance of the child's homeexperience, companionships, school and training. significance of the child's performances as seen from the scientific point of view.Studies of Childhood, p. 23
Sully was a principal founder of British child study, and the treatment of childhood as a distinct subject for systematic observation helped establish developmental psychology as a field. His method — sympathetic observation drawing on parental and teacher records — was pioneering but was superseded in rigor by the experimental and test-based developmental psychology of Binet, and by the more systematic stage-theoretic work of Hall, Baldwin, and above all Piaget. The anecdotal parental-record method drew the criticism that it lacks controls and generalizability. Yet naturalistic and observational methods remain central to developmental psychology, and Sully's humane insistence that the child be studied as it is, and that its errors and play are data, anticipates lasting commitments of the field.