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Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

Minds ripen at very different ages.

It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young.

As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development.

I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.

The mind of a child is no less vagrant than his steps; it pursues the gossamer and flies from object to object, lawless and unconfined, and it is equally necessary to the development of his frame that his thoughts and his body should be free from fetters.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?