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This book from the Institute Jean Jacques Rousseau, of Geneva, is a contribution to the language and the thought of the child. The keynote of the contribution is struck in the preface, which cautions against interpreting the child mind in terms of the adult mind and sums up the conclusions of the book very briefly by saying that the author suggests” that thought in the child is intermediate between autistic thinking and the logical thought processes of the adult.”
The first four chapters of the book are taken up with a discussion of the language and thought of the child up to nine years of age, but mostly younger than this. It contains an analysis of the actual expressions which were taken down in shorthand and carefully analyzed and roughly concludes as above. The thought processes from being at first wholly egocentric and having no social values, gradually develop through a series of intermediate stages to adult thinking, of which language is an expression and of which one of its functions is the conveying of thought to others. There are many illuminating passages and suggestions among them that the conflicts that arise in children and lead to quarreling have as one of their forward functions the stimulation of the necessity of being understood and therefore of being able to convey thought to others.