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This book is one of a series studying intelligence at various points of growth. In former works, The Child's Conception of the World, The Child's Conception of Space, The Construction of Reality in the Child, The Child's Conception of Physical Causality, the authors elucidated various stages in the growth of mental functioning and recognized four main stages in its development: 1, the sensorymotor stage from birth to about two years; 2, the preoperational or representative stage in the period two to six years; 3, the stage of concrete operations, ages seven to eleven; and 4, the period of formal operations in the age group twelve to fifteen years and onward. The latter stage of the development of intelligence is dealt with in detail in this work.
The first fifteen chapters (Parts I and II) present a series of protocols, selected from studies of fifteen hundred boys and girls, illustrating the approach of the child in each of the four stages of development to problems of increasing complexity, with an analysis of each. These chapters document thoroughly the change in cognitive functioning which takes place in the third and fourth stages. In the third stage the child's thought processes remain essentially attached to concrete reality. The subject can organize the given data, and though there is present the ability to extend the actual in the direction of the possible or potential, there is as yet no conception of hypothesis. In the fourth stage the essential change in the cognitive process is that there is a reversal in the direction of thinking between reality and possibility in that reality is now secondary to possibility: it proceeds from what is possible to what is empirically real. It is only in this fourth stage that the ability to use the concept 'all else being