"In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time"
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Baldwin writes like a man trying to give psychology a destiny. The sentence is all scaffolding - "confirmation", "parallelism", "discern" - but the payoff is a sweepingly literary image: "the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time". That metaphor matters. It turns a messy, contingent history of ideas into something with an outline, a silhouette you can recognize at a distance. Psychology becomes not just a science of minds but an archive of civilization's self-portrait.
The specific intent is to legitimize a then-fashionable move: reading individual development (how a child comes to a sense of Self) as a compressed replay of collective development (how a "race" - meaning humanity or, in the period's idiom, peoples - arrives at higher forms of thought). Baldwin wants the study of the Self to be historical proof, not private introspection. He's arguing for psychology as a bridge discipline, where lab and nursery observations can be elevated into an account of social evolution.
The subtext is where the era shows through. "Parallelism between individual and racial thought" smuggles in a hierarchy: some selves, some societies, are implied to be earlier on the timeline, closer to a psychological past. That is the Progressive Era confidence in development and progress, with an uncomfortable proximity to the period's racialized evolutionary narratives. The rhetoric softens the claim by aestheticizing it - a "profile" rather than a ranking - but the governing idea is still that minds, like nations, move along a track and that the psychologist can read that track like geology.
Contextually, it's Baldwin positioning psychology as the modern discipline capable of telling a grand story: not just what we think, but what history has been training us to become.
The specific intent is to legitimize a then-fashionable move: reading individual development (how a child comes to a sense of Self) as a compressed replay of collective development (how a "race" - meaning humanity or, in the period's idiom, peoples - arrives at higher forms of thought). Baldwin wants the study of the Self to be historical proof, not private introspection. He's arguing for psychology as a bridge discipline, where lab and nursery observations can be elevated into an account of social evolution.
The subtext is where the era shows through. "Parallelism between individual and racial thought" smuggles in a hierarchy: some selves, some societies, are implied to be earlier on the timeline, closer to a psychological past. That is the Progressive Era confidence in development and progress, with an uncomfortable proximity to the period's racialized evolutionary narratives. The rhetoric softens the claim by aestheticizing it - a "profile" rather than a ranking - but the governing idea is still that minds, like nations, move along a track and that the psychologist can read that track like geology.
Contextually, it's Baldwin positioning psychology as the modern discipline capable of telling a grand story: not just what we think, but what history has been training us to become.
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| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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