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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
development. By looking at a fully developed being, we are led to imagine his personality to be a sort of separate entity, and begin to think of it in the abstract. This erroneous impression can be removed at once, if we look back into the history of the development of the child from the moment of its birth, and follow its growth through the early stages of its life. Professor Haeckel has very ably discussed this point in his “Riddle of the Universe” as well as in “The Wonders of Life.” But he does not confine himself to the legitimate sphere of modern science, and allows his ambition to soar in an atmosphere too rarified for him to breathe. He, thus, loses his footing, and begins to flounder in the quagmires which abound so plentifully in the region of metaphysics to entangle the unwary. Concerning the Kantian dogmas, which included the immortality of the soul, it is said in "The Wonders of Life":
“ If Kant had had children, and followed patiently the development of the child's soul (as Preyer did a century later), he would hardly have persisted in his erroneous idea that reason, with its power of attaining a priori knowledge, is a transcendental and supernatural wonder of life, or a unique gift to man from heaven. The root of the error is that Kant had no idea of the natural evolution of mind. He did not employ the comparative and genetic methods to which we owe the chief scientific achievements of the last century. Kant and his followers who confined themselves, almost exclusively, to the introspective methods or the self-observation of their own mind, regarded as the model of the human soul the highly developed and versatile mind of the philosopher, and disregarded altogether the lower states of mental life which we find in the child and the savage."
As already observed, the learned professor is undoubtedly right as regards the evolution of personality, but we must not allow ourselves to be carried away by his
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