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p The history of development of the higher mental functions is an entirely unexplored field of psychology. Despite the enormous importance of studying the processes of development of the higher mental functions for the correct understanding and elucidation of absolutely all aspects of the child’s personality the boundaries of this field have not been clearly marked, the investigators are not methodologically cognisant of the problems they are faced with and no appropriate method of investigation has been elaborated; nor have investigators outlined or developed the elements of a theory or at least a working hypothesis which might help them to comprehend and tentatively to explain the facts obtained and the regularities observed in the process of work.

p Moreover, the very concept of development of the higher mental functions is still vague and unclear. It is not sufficiently differentiated from other closely associated and related concepts and its content is not definite enough.

p It stands to reason that with things as they are it is necessary to elucidate the basic concepts, state the main problems and ascertain the objects of investigation.

p The traditional views of the development of the higher mental functions are one-sided and erroneous primarily 12 and mainly because they are unable to see facts as facts of historical development, regard them as natural processes and formations, confuse them and fail to differentiate the organic from the cultural, the natural from the historical, the biological from the social in the child’s mental development, in a word—these views of the nature of the phenomena in question are fundamentally incorrect.

p The higher mental functions and complex cultural forms of behaviour with all the specific features of their function and structure, with all the specificity of their genetic development from appearance to complete maturity or extinction, with all the special laws by which they are governed, usually remained outside the investigator’s field of vision. Complex formations and processes were broken up into constituent elements and ceased to exist as a whole, as structures. They were reduced to processes of a more elementary order, occupying a subordinate position and performing a definite function with respect to the whole, part of which they formed. Like an organism which, broken up into its constituent elements, reveals its composition, but no longer displays its specifically organic properties and regularities, these complex and integral psychological formations lost their basic quality and ceased to be themselves when reduced to processes of a more elementary order.

p Such an approach to the problem of the child’s mental development was pernicious because the concept of development radically differs from the mechanistic conception which likens the appearance of the complex mental process from separate parts or elements to a sum forming from arithmetical addition of separate numbers.

p Since this approach to the problems of development of the child’s higher mental functions prevailed the analysis of the ready form of behaviour was, as a rule, replaced by elucidation of the genesis of this form. The genesis was often replaced by an analysis of some complex form of behaviour at various stages of its development so that an impression was created that not the form as a whole developed, but its separate elements, together forming at each given stage of their development a particular phase in the development of the given form of behaviour.

p Under these circumstances the very process of development of complex and higher forms of behaviour failed to be elucidated and methodologically comprehended.

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p One of the most essential features of such an approach is that psychology has not as yet sufficiently firmly established the differences between the organic and cultural processes of development and maturation, between two genetic series differing in essence and nature, and, consequently, between two fundamentally different series of regularities which govern these two lines of development of the child’s behaviour.

p Child psychology—the older psychology, as well as that of our time—is characterised by an opposite striving, namely, to put all the facts of the cultural and organic development of the child’s behaviour in one series and to regard them as a phenomenon of one order, one psychological nature, revealing fundamentally the same kind of regularities.

p This is the result of refusing to study the specific regularities of one series, reducing complex mental processes to elementary processes and studying one-sidedly the natural aspects of the mental functions.

p Old subjective psychology saw the main object of scientific investigation in singling out the primary, no further dissociable elements of experience, which it found through abstracting elementary mental phenomena, like sensation of pleasure, displeasure and volitional effort, or in similarly isolated elementary mental processes and functions, such as attention and association. The higher and complex processes were broken up into constituent parts; they were completely reduced to combinations of these primary experiences or processes of various complexity and form. This gave rise to a vast mosaic of mental life composed of separate pieces of experiences, an immense atomistic picture of the dismembered human spirit.

p Nor does the new, objective psychology know any other ways of cognising the complex whole except analysis and dissociation, except elucidation of the composition and reduction to elements. Reflexology  [13•*  closes its eyes on the 14 qualitative specificity of the higher forms of behaviour; it makes no fundamental distinction between them and the lower, elementary processes. All processes of behaviour are broken up into chains of combinative reflexes differing in length and the number of links, in some cases inhibited and not revealed in their external part. Behaviourism operates with units of a somewhat different character, but if some units are replaced by others, if the reflexes are replaced by reactions in the reflexological analysis of the higher forms of behaviour, the resulting picture will very much resemble the one produced by the analyses of objective psychology.

p But in the problem of the child’s cultural development the ways of objective and subjective psychology diverge as they approach the higher mental functions. Whereas objective psychology consistently altogether refuses to discriminate between the higher and lower mental functions, limiting itself to dividing reactions into inborn and acquired and regarding all acquired reactions as a single class of skills, empiric psychology, on the one hand, limited with magnificent consistence the child’s development to maturation of elementary functions and, on the other hand, built over each elementary function a second storey taking it from no one knows where.

p In addition to mechanical memory, logical memory was distinguished as its highest form; voluntary attention was superimposed on involuntary attention; reproductive imagination was topped by creative imagination; conceptual thinking rose as a second storey over imaginative thinking; lower feelings were symmetrically supplemented by higher feelings, and impulsive volition—by previsional volition.

p Thus the whole theory of the most important mental functions was built in two storeys. But since child psychology had to do only with the lower storey, while the development and origin of the higher functions remained entirely unelucidated, this created a gap between child psychology and general psychology. What general psychology found and set apart as voluntary attention, creative imagination, logical memory, previsional volition, etc., i.e., the higher forms, the higher functions, remained terra incognita for child psychology.

p Failure to ascertain the genesis of the higher functions 15 inevitably leads to an essentially metaphysical conception, namely, the higher and lower forms of memory, attention and thinking exist side by side, independent of each other, unconnected genetically, functionally or structurally, as though originally created separately, as the existence of various species of animals was conceived before Darwin. This closed the way to scientific investigation and explanation of the higher processes also for general psychology, so that not only the history of development, but also the theory of logical memory and voluntary attention is absent from modern psychology.

p This metaphysical division of psychology into two storeys, this dualism of the higher and the lower finds its extreme expression in the idea of dividing psychology into two separate and independent sciences: physiologic, natural-science, explanatory or causal psychology, on the one hand, and conceptual, descriptive or teleological psychology of the spirit, as the basis of all the humanities, on the other hand. This idea of Dilthey, Miinsterberg, Husserl and many others, extraordinarily popular in our time and numbering many adherents, reveals in pure form two heterogeneous and in a certain sense contrary tendencies which have opposed each other within empirical psychology as long as it has existed.

p It is impossible to find more convincing proof of the insolubility of the problem of higher mental functions on the basis of empirical psychology than the historical fate of this science, breaking up in two before our very eyes and striving to sacrifice its lower part to natural science in order to retain the higher part in pure form and thereby rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s... . Thus the dilemma which empirical psychology has realised as fatal and inevitable consists in the choice of either physiology of the mind or metaphysics. Psychology as a science is impossible—such is the historical result of empirical psychology.

p We have endeavoured to show the present-day state of the problem of development of the higher mental functions and the blind alleys into which the problem has been driven in the most important psychological systems of our time so that we may thereby, first, outline the concrete content and subject of pur investigation and disclose the 16 content of the concept of “development of the higher mental functions" or “the child’s cultural development”, secondly, state the problem of development ol the higher mental functions as one of the main problems of child psychology, and, thirdly, outline the methodological conception of this most complicated and extraordinarily muddled problem, and seek an approach to it.

p The concept of “development of the higher menial functions" covers two groups of phenomena which at first sight appear entirely dissimilar, but are actually two main branches, two inseparably connected but never confluent streams of development of the higher forms of behaviour. These are, first, the processes of mastering the external means of cultural development and thinking—language, writing, counting and drawing, and, secondly, the processes of development of the special higher mental functions which are not delimited, nor in any way exactly defined, and are called in traditional psychology voluntary attention, logical memory, formation of concepts, etc. All of them taken together form what we conventionally call the process of development of the higher forms of the child’s behaviour.

p In this conception the problem of development of the higher forms of behaviour has never occurred to child psychology as a special problem. It is not found in the modern system of child psychology as a single and special field of investigation and study. It is dispersed in parts through most diverse chapters of child psychology. Nor could either of the two main parts of our problem—- development of the child’s speech, writing and drawing, and development of the higher mental functions in the proper sense of the word, as we have already seen, be adequately solved separately in child psychology.

p This is due mainly to the fact that child psychology has not yet learned the indubitable truth that it is necessary to distinguish two, essentially different lines in the child’s mental development. In dealing with the development of the child’s behaviour child psychology does not know which of the two lines it is a question of, confuses the two lines and regards this confusion—the product of an undifferentiated scientific conception of a complex process—as the real unity and simplicity of the process itself. In a word, child psychology continues to regard the process of 17 development of the child’s behaviour as simple, whereas it is actually a complex process. This is undoubtedly the source of all the main fallacies, false interpretations and erroneous statements of the problem of “development of the higher mental functions”. Ascertainment of this proposition about the two lines of the child’s mental development forms a necessary prerequisite for all of our investigation.

p The behaviour of a modern cultured adult is the result of two different processes of mental development: the process of biological evolution of the animal species which gave rise to the species of homo sapiens, and the process of historical development which has transformed primitive man into cultured man. Both these processes of biological and cultural development of behaviour are represented in the phylogenesis separately as individual and independent lines of development, constituting the object of various independent psychological disciplines.

p The specificity and difficulty of the problem of development of the child’s higher mental functions are that in the ontogenesis both these lines blend and actually form a single, although complex process. That is precisely why child psychology has not yet become aware of the specificity of the higher forms of behaviour, whereas ethnic psychology (psychology of primitive peoples) and comparative psychology (biological, evolutionary psychology) which deal with one of the two lines of phylogenetic development of behaviour have long since become aware each of its own subject. It will never occur to the representatives of these sciences to identify these two processes and to consider the development from primitive man to cultured man a mere continuation of the development from animal to man or to reduce the cultural development of behaviour to biological development. And yet this is precisely what is taking place at each step in child psychology.

p We must therefore turn to the phylogenesis which does not know of any unification and blending of the two lines in order to undo the knot which has formed in child psychology.

p The radical and fundamental difference between man’s historical development and the biological evolution of the animal species is known well enough; that is why, to the extent that man’s historical development differs from the 18 biological evolution of the animal species, the cultural type of development of the behaviour must apparently differ from the biological type of development, since the two processes form part of more general processes—history and evolution.

p Thus we are faced with the process of psychological development sui generis, a process of its own kind.

p The fact that the development of the higher mental functions takes place without any changes in the biological type of man, whereas the change in the biological type is the basis of the evolutionary type of development, must be considered the basic and decisive difference between this process and the evolutionary process. It is well known and has been repeatedly pointed out that this feature also forms the general difference from man’s historical development. With the entirely changed type of adaptation it is the development of man’s artificial organs—tools—and not the change in organs and body structure that comes to the foreground.

p Primitive man does not display any essential differences in the biological type, differences which may account for the enormous difference in behaviour. All the latest investigations in this field agree that this equally applies to the most primitive man of the now living tribes, who, according to the expression of one of the investigators, must be awarded the full title of man, and to prehistoric man of the closest epoch, who, as we know, also does not display such appreciable somatic differences which may warrant regarding him as a lower category of man. In both cases, according to the same investigator, we are dealing with a full-fledged, only more primitive, human type.

p All investigations confirm this proposition and show that there are no essential differences in the biological type of primitive man, which might account for the behaviour differences between primitive and cultured man. None of the elementary psychological and physiological functions— perceptions, movements, reactions, etc.—show any deviations from the same functions of cultured man. This is as basic a fact for the psychology of primitive man, for historical psychology, as the contrary proposition is for biological psychology.

p But to the same extent that the elementary psychophysiological functions have remained unchanged in the 19 process of historical development, the higher functions (verbal thinking, logical memory, formation of concepts, voluntary attention, volition, etc.) have suffered deep and all-round changes.

p Culture creates special forms of behaviour, modifies the activity of the mental functions and adds new storeys to the developing system of human behaviour. This is the basic fact of which we are persuaded by every page of psychology of primitive man, which studies culturalpsychological development in its pure, isolated form. In the process of historical development social man changes the ways and means of his behaviour, transforms the natural instincts and functions, elaborates and creates new forms of behaviour—specifically cultured forms.

Child psychology did not know of the problem of higher mental functions or, what is the same thing, the problem .of the child’s cultural development. That is why the central and highest problem of psychology—the problem of the personality and its development—is still closed to it. Through its best representatives child psychology arrives at the conclusion that the “description of the inner life of man as a whole is the province of a poet or a historian”. Essentially this is a testimonium paupertatis, i.e., a statement of failure of child psychology, an admission that it is absolutely impossible to investigate the problem of personality within the methodological boundaries within which child psychology has arisen and developed. Only by decisively going beyond the methodological limits of traditional child psychology may it be possible to investigate the development of the higher mental synthesis which must with good reason be called the child’s personality. The history of the child’s cultural development brings us to the history of the development of the personality.