The Construction Of Reality In The Child

The study of sensorimotor or practical intelligence in the first two years of development has taught us how the child, at first directly assimilating the external environment to his own activity, later, in order to extend this assimilation, forms an increasing number of schemata which are both more mobile and better able to intercoordinate. Side by side with this progressive involvement of the assimilatory schemata runs the continuous elaboration of the external universe, in other words, the convergent development of the explicatory function. It is apparent that a development of explicatory accommodation corresponds to the progress of implicatory assimilation. The increasing coherence of the schemata thus parallels the formation of a world of objects and spatial relationships, in short, the elaboration of a solid and permanent universe. We must study the second aspect of the evolution of sensorimotor intelligence. This new phase of mental development is of course inseparable from the first, object and causality are nothing other than accommodation to the reality of the schematism of assimilation. It is justifiable to study these phases separately, for the description of behavior no longer suffices to account for these new products of intellectual activity; it is the subject's own interpretation of things which we must now try to analyze. The symmetry between the representation of things and the functional development of intelligence enables us from now on to glimpse the directional line of the evolution of the concepts of object, space, causality, and time. This organization of reality occurs, as we shall see, to the extent that the self is freed from itself by finding itself and so assigns itself a place as a thing among things, an event among events.