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244 Jean Piaget
about the factors of nervous maturation, which no doubt partly come into the
development of mental processes.
2. The development of the child and of the adolescent, especially detailed
information on the processes of socialization that modify most of their psychological
characteristics. In this connexion, it has been shown in particular that
socialization does not just consist of the mental or material pressures exerted by
the adult in the family or at school, and that ‘co-operation’ between contemporaries
may also play a vital part, especially in the development of moral feelings.
As to factors concerning transmission proper, there are a great many quite
distinct processes, and the child certainly does not submit in the same way to
the rules of spelling, for example, or to community beliefs forming part of current
ideologies, as to the rules of logic or mathematics, the sense of which he
understands only by reinventing in part (and by forgetting what has not been
actively reconstructed).
3. The social behaviour of the adult, in group dynamics or community life in
general, including the countless forms of social conduct that are interiorized
and applied to oneself in accordance with a well-known process (e.g., internal
speech).
We therefore see that point (2) above is in fact the most important one, firstly
because it concerns the training of the individual and only training is explanatory
and the source of verifiable information, and secondly because it includes
and throws light on the other two, since hereditary factors are discernible
only through their action in the course of development and adult behaviour
patterns are determined by previous behaviour patterns.
Strangely enough, it was a long time before it was realized that the psychology
of development was a key factor in this connexion, and performed a
function that was as essential to the sociologist as to the psychologist. J. M.
Baldwin was probably the first to grasp this clearly, but unfortunately without
verifying it systematically by experiment. He has left us, however, thevery stimulating
idea, often confirmed since, that the feeling of the ‘ego’ itself is certainly
not an innate or spontaneous product of consciousness as such, which begins
with a phase of radical ‘adualism’, and that it is due to inter-individualexchanges
beginning with imitation. Next, Pierre Janet, a doctor and a psychologist, whom
someone wittily used to call ‘France’s leading sociologist’, repeatedly stressed
in his picture of the development and hierarchy of conduct (inspired by pathology)
the social formation of a series of apparently entirely internal functions:
reflexion as a product of deliberation, recollection linked to the ‘unfolding of
the narrative’, belief as a promise or undertaking, and so on. But it is, of course,
child psychologists who have provided the most information on the detailed
operation of socialization; this material is experimentarily checked, since for
every age it is possible to verify hypotheses by means of facts that can be repeated
at will. In this connexion, we could cite a large number of studies carried out in
the USSR, in English-speaking countries, in Paris, in Geneva, and so on, which
do not entirely concord, moreover, with all the proposed interpretations.