GENEVIC PSYCHOLOGY (from Ck.-ylveats genesis, origin, from 71-yveaOcit, gignesthai, to be born). Under this head are included all those branches of psychology which treat of the growth or development of mind, individual or social. Hence, like experimental psychology (q.v.), it is rather psychology as viewed from a particular standpoint than a particular department of general psychology. It is customary to bracket together animal and child psychology (qq.v.) under the genetic heading; but while the child mind may be investigated as the immediate, and the animal mind as the more remote source of origin of the adult human mind, both the ani mal and the child may also be examined for themselves, without overt regard to their place in the evolutionary series. Ethnopsychology and social psychology, in the same way, may be treated either statically or genetically, though as a rule (especially in the discussion of the great mental products, myth, language, and cus tom) the genetic method is followed.
Modern science is so thoroughly dominated by the evolutionary idea that it may seem, at first thought, as if a scientific psychology must neces sarily be genetic. And this is true, in the sense that the psychologist, in whatever field he may be working, must never forget the' organic char acter of mind, the fact that our present con sciousnesses are what they are by reason of thq past history of mind as well as of current stim uli. Even when we attempt to analyze so ap parently simple a process as perception, we are invariably referred to genesis for the explana tion of certain of its features. At the• same time, it would be impossible to-day to write a satisfactory genetic psychology, in the full mean ing of the term. For (1) the most assured re sults of mental science' lie in the domain of analysis, not of genesis. When we think of the development of mind, we think instinctively of the development of mental function. Now, a
psychology of function tends to become a merely classificatory psychology (see FACULTY) ; and the writers who have escaped this tendency are not in agreement among themselves, some mak ing will, and some feeling, and some an intel lectual process, the root function of mind. It follows that the works on genetic psychology have a distinct personal flavor ; it is as natural to speak of 'Spencer's psychology' as it is un natural to speak of 'Kelvin's physics' or `Liebig's chemistry.' Again, (2) while the belief is prac tically universal among psychologists that the human mind has grown out of the rudimentary consciousness of primitive organisms, it is still very difficult to envisage the course of develop ment, to imagine what the primitive mind was and how—by what steps or stages, by what mechanism—it has developed. Some investigat ors (e.g. Romans) write as if there were a simple superposition of function on function, faculty on faculty ; others (e.g. Baldwin) give us rather a development of a motor than of a mental organism; others offer descriptions of special consciousnesses at various levels of devel opment, without asking how the earlier become transformed and differentiated into the later.
A genetic psychology is, therefore, not so much an accomplished fact as the conscious and neces sary ideal of psychological inquiry, itself the final term of a psychological development. As anatomy comes before physiology, so has the analysis of mental structure, furnished by ex perimental psychology, come before any accepted discrimination of mental functions.
Consult: Darwin, Descent of Man (New York, 1895) ; Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (New York, 1895, 1897) ; Spencer, Psychology (New York, 1881) ; manes, Mental Evolution: Man (London, 1885) ; id., Mental Evolution: Animals (London, 1888).