James Mark Baldwin: The natural and the good Emily D. Cahan * Wheelock College, 200 The Riverway, Boston, MA 02215, USA Received 10 December 2001; revised 13 May 2002 1. Introduction In 1965, William Kessen published The Child, a book for which he se- lected and with great insight commented on primary works from many of the medical, religious, philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical roots of contemporary developmental psychology. Commenting on James Mark BaldwinÕs penultimate four volume work in epistemology and the growth of logic, Thought and things: A study in the development and meaning of thought, or, genetic logic (1906–1915), Kessen remarked that it was ‘‘brilliant and one of the few truly original documents in psychology, crowded with invented words, and all the apparatus of a philosophical system...’’ (Kes- sen, 1965, p. 165). Though held together sometimes in mysterious ways and constructed over many years, Baldwin wrote a truly general theory of development. His developmental and social psychologies addressed develop- ment in evolution (natural history), in the individual (ontogenetic history), and in human history as a whole. BaldwinÕs general theory of development, based on principles of evolutionary science, worked its way through natural history to the development of a logical, social, and moral self and society. His psychology embraced, under one vast theoretical framework, what we today call cognitive, social, and moral development. Logical developments come into play as the child constructs a series of progressive, stage-like Developmental Review 23 (2003) 9–28 www.elsevier.com/locate/dr * Fax: 1-617-879-2166. E-mail address: ecahan@wheelock.edu. 0273-2297/03/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0273-2297(03)00003-0