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This fourth and last volume of Piaget's studies deals with the Child's Conception of Physical Causality and approaches an unraveling of this problem in the same way as have his previous volumes, The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, reviewed in Psychoanal. Rev., Vol. XVI, No. 3, July, 1929, and The Child's Conception of the World, reviewed in Psychoanal. Rev., Vol. XVI, No. 4, October, 1929.
Section I deals with the explanation of movement, particularly of the air, of the breath, of the clouds, of heavenly bodies and water currents, and closes with a discussion of the child's idea of force. Section II deals with prediction and explanation of such problems as the floating of boats, the level of water, and the problem of shadows. Section III deals with the explanation of machines and includes a research into the understanding of bicycles, steamengines, trains, motor cars and aeroplanes; while Section IV consists of a summary not only of the present volume but also of the previous volume, The Child's Conception of the World. This summary of only some seventy pages contains the meat of the whole matter and should be read in the original. It is unfortunately not easy to understand, however, unless all that it is founded upon has been previously read. In the short limits of a review only a few of the outstanding features can be mentioned.
This final summary is divided into six parts, each one of which I will briefly discuss as follows:
The Child's Reality. There are three complementary processes at work in the evolution of reality as conceived by the child:
Child thought moves from realism to objectivity, which involves a differentiation as between the “I” and the “not I.”
* : The Child's Conception of Physical Causality. Published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1930.
This stage of lack of distinction between the “I” and the external world the author speaks of as protoplasmic consciousness, while the constitution of the