CHAPTER IV.

THE MIND OF THE CHILD—CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.

One of the most interesting chapters of modern psychology is that which deals with the child. This is also one of the topics of general concern, since our common humanity reacts with greater geniality upon the little ones, in whom we instinctively see innocence and simplicity. The popular interest in children has been, however—as uncharitable as it may seem to say it—of very little service to the scientific investigation of childhood. Even to-day, when a greater body of valuable results are being secured, the main danger to the proper study of the child's mind comes from the over-enthusiasm and uninstructed assurance of some of its friends. Especially is this the case in America, where "child study" has become a fad to be pursued by parents and teachers who know little about the principles of scientific method, and where influential educators have enlisted so-called "observers" in taking indiscriminate notes on the doings of children with no definite problem in view, and with no criticism of their procedure. It is in place, therefore, to say clearly, at the outset, that this chapter does not mean to stimulate parents or unpsychological readers to report observations; and further to say also that in the mind of the writer the publications made lately of large numbers of replies to "syllabi" are for the most part worthless, because they heap together observations obtained by persons of every degree of competence and incompetence.

On the other hand, the requisites here, as in every other sphere of exact observation, are clear enough. The student of the child's mind should have a thorough knowledge of the principles of general psychology, in order to know what is characteristic of the child when he sees it, and what is exceptional; and he should also have enough originality in his ideas and interpretations to catch the valuable in the child's doings, distinguishing it from the commonplace, and to plan situations and even experiments which will give him some control upon those actions of the child which seem to be worth it. The need of these qualities is seen in the history of the problems of the child's growth which have been taken up even by the most competent psychologists. The results show a gradual attainment of control over the problem in hand, each observer criticising the method and results of his predecessor until certain rules of observation and experiment have been evolved which allow of the repetition and repeated observation of the events of the child's life.

As illustrating the sort of problems in which there has been this careful and critical work, I may instance these: the child's reflex movements, the beginnings and growth of sensation, such as colour, the rise of discrimination and preference, the origin of right and left-handedness, the rise, mechanism, and meaning of imitation, the acquisition of speech and handwriting, the growth of the child's sense of personality and of his social consciousness, and the laws of physical growth, as bearing upon mental development. In all these cases, however, there is again a greater and a less exactness. The topics with the reports of results which I am going on to give may be taken, however, as typical, and as showing the direction of complete knowledge rather than as having in any one case approached it.

Before we take up particular questions, however, a word may be allowed upon the general bearings of the study of the child's mind. I do this the more willingly, since it is still true, in spite of the hopeful outlook for positive results, that it is mainly the willingness of psychology to recognise the problems and work at them that makes the topic important at present. To investigate the child by scientific methods is really to bring into psychology a procedure which has revolutionized the natural sciences; and it is destined to revolutionize the moral sciences by making them also in a great measure natural sciences. The new and important question about the mind which is thus recognised is this: How did it grow? What light upon its activity and nature can we get from a positive knowledge of its early stages and processes of growth? This at once introduces other questions: How is the growth of the child related to that of the animals?—how, through heredity and social influences, to the growth of the race and of the family and society in which he is brought up? All this can be comprehended only in the light of the doctrine of evolution, which has rejuvenated the sciences of life; and we are now beginning to see a rejuvenation of the sciences of mind from the same point of view. This is what is meant when we hear it said that psychology is becoming "genetic."

The advantages to be derived from the study of young children from this point of view may be briefly indicated.

1. In the first place, the facts of the infant consciousness are very simple; that is, they are the child's sensations or memories simply, not his own observations of them. In the adult mind the disturbing influence of self-observation is a matter of notorious moment. It is impossible for me to report exactly what I feel, for the observation of it by my attention alters its character. My volition also is a complex thing, involving my personal pride and self-consciousness. But the child's emotion is as spontaneous as a spring. The effects of it in the mental life come out in action, pure and uninfluenced by calculation and duplicity and adult reserve. There is around every one of us adults a web of convention and prejudice of our own making. Not only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, but each of us builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality with himself. We are subject, as Bacon said, not only to "idols of the forum," but also to "idols of the den."

The child, on the contrary, has not learned his own importance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness.

2. The study of children is often the only means of testing the truth of our analyses. If we decide that a certain mental state is due to a union of simpler elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the child's mental life are so low in the scale, in the matter of mental endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under debate in psychology which may not be tested by this method.

At this point it is that child psychology is more valuable than the study of the mind of animals. The latter never become men, while children do. The animals represent in some few respects a branch of the tree of growth in advance of man, while being in many other respects very far behind him. In studying animals we are always haunted by the fear that the analogy from him to man may not hold; that some element essential to the development of the human mind may not be in the animal at all. Even in such a question as the localization of the functions of the brain described later on, where the analogy is one of comparative anatomy and only secondarily of psychology, the monkey presents analogies with man which dogs do not. But in the study of children we may be always sure that a normal child has in him the promise of a normal man.

3. Again, in the study of the child's mind we have the added advantage of a corresponding simplicity on the bodily side; we are able to take account of the physiological processes at a time when they are relatively simple—that is, before the nervous system has grown to maturity. For example, psychology used to hold that we have a "speech faculty," an inborn mental endowment which is incapable of further analysis; but support for the position is wanting when we turn to the brain of the infant. Not only do we fail to find the series of centres now known to be the "speech zone," but even those of them which we do find have not yet taken up this function, either alone or together. In other words, the primary object of each of the various centres involved is not speech, but some other and simpler function; and speech arises by development from a union of these separate functions.

4. In observing young children, a more direct application of experiment is possible. By "experiment" here I mean both experiment on the senses and also experiment directly on consciousness by suggestion, social influence, etc. In experimenting on adults, great difficulties arise through the fact that reactions—such as performing a voluntary movement when a signal is heard, etc.—are complicated by deliberation, habit, custom, choice, etc. The subject hears a sound, identifies it, and presses a button—if he choose and agree to do so. What goes on in this interval between the advent of the incoming nerve process and the discharge of the outgoing nerve process? Something, at any rate, which represents a brain process of great complexity. Now, anything that fixes or simplifies the brain process, in so far gives greater certainty to the results. For this reason experiments on reflex actions are valuable and decisive where similar experiments on voluntary actions are uncertain and of doubtful value. Now the child's mind is relatively simple, and so offers a field for more fruitful experiment; this is seen in the reactions of the infant to strong stimuli, such as bright colours, etc., as related further on.

With this inadequate review of the advantages of infant psychology, it is well also to point out the dangers of the abuse of it. Such dangers are real. The very simplicity which seems to characterize the life of the child is often extremely misleading, and this because the simplicity in question is sometimes ambiguous. Two actions of the child may appear equally simple; but one may be an adaptive action, learned with great pains and really very complex, while the other may be inadaptive and really simple. Children differ under the law of heredity very remarkably, even in the simplest manifestations of their conscious lives. It is never safe to say without qualification: "This child did, consequently all children must." The most we can usually say in observing single children is: "This child did, consequently another child may."

Speaking more positively, the following remarks may be useful to those who have a mind to observe children:

1. In the first place, we can fix no absolute time in the history of the child at which a certain mental process takes its rise. The observations, now quite extensively recorded, and sometimes quoted as showing that the first year, or the second year, etc., brings such and such developments, tend, on the contrary, to show that such divisions do not hold in any strict sense. Like any other organic growth, the nervous system may develop faster under more favourable conditions, or more slowly under less favourable; and the growth of the mind is largely dependent upon the growth of the brain. Only in broad outline and within very wide limits can such periods be marked off at all.

2. The possibility of the occurrence of a mental state at a particular time must be distinguished from its necessity. The occurrence of a single clearly observed fact is decisive only against the theory according to which its occurrence under the given conditions may not occur. For example, the very early adaptive movements of the infant in receiving its food can not be due to intelligence and will; but the case is still open as to the question what is the reason of their presence—i.e., how much nervous development is present, how much experience is necessary, etc. It is well to emphasize the fact that one case may be decisive in overthrowing a theory, but the conditions are seldom simple enough to make one case decisive in establishing a theory.

3. It follows, however, from the principle of growth itself that the order of development of the main mental functions is constant, and normally free from great variations; consequently, the most fruitful observations of children are those which show that such an act was present before another. The complexity becomes finally so remarkable that there seems to be no before or after at all in mental things; but if the child's growth shows a stage in which any process is clearly absent, we have at once light upon the laws of growth. For instance: if a single case is conclusively established of a child's drawing an inference before it begins to use words or significant vocal sounds, the one case is as good as a thousand to show that thought may develop in some degree independently of spoken language.

4. While the most direct results are acquired by systematic experiments with a given point in view, still general observations carefully recorded by competent persons, are important for the interpretation which a great many such records may afford in the end. In the multitude of experiences here, as everywhere, there is strength. Such observations should cover everything about the child—his movements, cries, impulses, sleep, dreams, personal preferences, muscular efforts, attempts at expression, games, favourites, etc.—and should be recorded in a regular daybook at the time of occurrence. What is important and what is not, is, as I have said, something to be learned; and it is extremely desirable that any one contemplating such observations should acquaint himself beforehand with the principles of general psychology and physiology, and should seek also the practical advice of a trained observer.

As yet many of the observations which we have in this field were made by the average mother, who knows less about the human body than she does about the moon or the wild flowers, or by the average father, who sees his child for an hour a day, when the boy is dressed up, and who has never slept in the same room with him—let alone the same bed!—in his life; by people who have never heard the distinction between reflex and voluntary action, or that between nervous adaptation and conscious choice. The difference between the average mother and the good psychologist is this: she has no theories, he has; he has no interests, she has. She may bring up a family of a dozen and not be able to make a single trustworthy observation; he maybe able, from one sound of one yearling, to confirm theories of the neurologist and educator, which are momentous for the future training and welfare of the child.

As for experimenting with children, only the psychologist should undertake it. The connections between the body and the mind are so close in infancy, the mere animal can do so much to ape reason, and the child is so helpless under the leading of instinct, impulse, and external necessity, that the task is excessively difficult—to say nothing of the extreme delicacy and tenderness of the budding tendrils of the mind. But others do experiment! Every time we send a child out of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most serious and alarming kind. He goes into the hands of a teacher who is often not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but who is, perchance, a machine for administering a single experiment to an infinite variety of children. It is perfectly certain that a great many of our children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the school; but we can not be at all sure that they would fare any better if they were taught at home! The children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case, that possibly a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight and psychological information, would do them good.

Methods of experimenting with Children.—In endeavouring to bring such questions as the degree of memory, recognition, association, etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable embarrassment has always been experienced in understanding the child's vocal and other responses. Of course, the only way a child's mind can be studied is through its expressions, facial, lingual, vocal, muscular; and the first question—i.e., What did the infant do? must be followed by a second—i.e., What did his doing that mean? The second question is, as I have said, the harder question, and the one which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident, on the surface, that the further away we get in the child's life from simple inherited or reflex responses, the more complicated do the processes become, and the greater becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and arriving at a true picture of the real mental condition which lies back of them.

To illustrate this confusion, I may cite one of the few problems which psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the different colours. The first series of experiments consisted in showing the child various colours and requiring him to name them, the results being expressed in percentages of correct answers to the whole number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different questions, and the results give absolutely no clew to their separation. It involves:

1. The child's distinguishing different colours displayed simultaneously before it, together with the complete development of the eyes for colour sensation. 2. The child's ability to recognise or identify a colour after having seen it once. 3. An association between the child's colour seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by which the proper name for the colours is brought up in his mind. 4. Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various names of the colours which he recognises; and there is the further embarrassment, that any such process which involves association of ideas, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that speech is acquired long after objects and some colours are distinguished, shows that results reached by this method have very little value as far as the problem of the first perception of colours is concerned.

That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of confusion is shown by the fact that children recognise many words which they can not readily pronounce. When this was realized, a second phase in the development of the problem arose. A colour was named, and then the child was required to pick out that colour. This gave results different from those reached by the first method, blue and red leading the list in correct answers by the first method, while by this second method yellow led, and blue came near the end of the list.

The further objection that colours might be distinguished before the word names are learned, or that colour words might be interchanged or confused by the child, gave rise to what we may call the third stage in the statement of the problem. The method of "recognition" took the place of the method of "naming." This consisted in showing to a child a coloured disk, without naming it, and then asking him to pick out the same colour from a number of coloured disks.

This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named above. It is the usual method of testing for colour blindness, in which, from defects of vision, certain colours can not be perceived at all. It answers very well for colour blindness; for what we really want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signal-man is whether he can recognise a given signal when it is repeated; that is, does he know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or red? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question in the matter—the real question of colour perception. It is quite possible that a child might not recognise an isolated colour when he could really very well distinguish the colours lying side by side. The last question, then, is this: When does the child get the different colour Sensations (not recognitions), and in what order?

To solve this question it would seem that experiments should be made upon younger children. The results described above were all secured after the children had made considerable progress in learning to speak.

To meet this requirement another method may be used which can be applied to children less than a year old. The colours are shown, and the child led to grasp after them. This method is of such a character as to yield a series of experiments whose results are in terms of the most fundamental movements of the infant; it can be easily and pleasantly conducted; and it is of wide application. The child's hand movements are nearly ideal in this respect. The hand reflects the child's first feelings, and becomes the most mobile organ of his volition, except his organs of speech. We find spontaneous arm and hand movements, reflex movements, reaching-out movements, grasping movements, imitative movements, manipulating movements, and voluntary efforts—all these, in order, reflecting the development of the mind.

To illustrate this method, I may cite certain results reached by myself on the questions of colour and distance perception, and right-handedness in the child.

Distance and Colour Perception.—I undertook at the beginning of my child H.'s ninth month to experiment with her with a view to arriving at the exact state of her colour perception, and also to investigate her sense of distance. The arrangements consisted in this instance in giving the infant a comfortable sitting posture, kept constant by a band passing around her chest and fastened securely to the back of her chair. Her arms were left bare and quite free in their movements. Pieces of paper of different colours were exposed before her, at varying distances, front, right, and left. This was regulated by a framework, consisting of a horizontal rod graded in inches, projecting from the back of the chair at a level with her shoulder and parallel with her arm when extended straight forward, and carrying on it another rod, also graded in inches, at right angles to the first. This second rod was thus a horizontal line directly in front of the child, parallel with a line connecting her shoulders, and so equally distant for both hands. This second rod was made to slide upon the first, so as to be adjusted at any desired distance from the child. On this second rod the colours, etc., were placed in succession, the object being to excite the child to reach for them. So far from being distasteful to the infant, I found that, with pleasant suggestions thrown about the experiments, the whole procedure gave her much gratification, and the affair became one of her pleasant daily occupations. After each sitting she was given a reward of some kind. I give the results, both for colour and distance, of 217 experiments. Of these 111 were with five colours and 106 with ordinary newspaper (chosen as a relatively neutral object, which would have no colour value and no association, to the infant).

Colour.—The colours range themselves in the order of attractiveness—blue, red, white, green, and brown. Disregarding white, the difference between blue and red is very slight, compared with that between any other two. This confirms the results of the second method described above. Brown, to my child—as tested in this way—seemed to be about as neutral as could well be. A similar distaste for brown has been noticed by others. White, on the other hand, was more attractive than green. I am sorry that my list did not include yellow. The newspaper was, at reaching distance (9 to 10 inches) and a little more (up to 14 inches), as attractive as the average of the colours, and even as much so as the red; but this is probably due to the fact that the newspaper experiments came after a good deal of practice in reaching after colours, and a more exact association between the stimulus and its distance. At 15 inches and over, the newspaper was refused in 93 per cent of the cases, while blue was refused at that distance in only 75 per cent, and red in 83 per cent.

Distance.—In regard to the question of distance, the child persistently refused to reach for anything put 16 inches or more away from her. At 15 inches she refused 91 per cent of all the cases, 90 per cent of the colour cases, and, as I have said, 93 per cent of the newspaper cases. At nearer distances we find the remarkable uniformity with which the safe-distance association works at this early age. At 14 inches only 14 per cent of all the cases were refused, and at 13 inches only about 7 per cent. There was a larger percentage of refusals at 11 and 12 inches than at 13 and 14 inches, a result due to the influence of the brown, which was refused consistently when more than 10 inches away. The fact that there were no refusals to reach for anything exposed within reaching distance (10 inches)—other attractive objects being kept away—shows two things; (1) the very fine estimation visually of the distance represented by the arm-length; and (2) the great uniformity at this age of the phenomenon of Motor Suggestion upon which this method of child study is based, and which is referred to again below. In respect to the first point, it will be remembered that the child does not begin to reach for anything that it sees until about the fourth or sixth week; so it is evident at what a remarkably fast rate those obscure factors of size, perspective, light and shade, etc., which signify distance to the eye, become associated with arm movements of reaching. This method, applied with proper precautions, obviates many of the difficulties of the others. There are certain requirements of proper procedure, however, which should never be neglected by any one who experiments with young children.

In the first place, the child is peculiarly susceptible to the appeals of change, novelty, chance, or happy suggestion; and often the failure to respond to a stimulus is due to distraction or to discomfort rather than to lack of intrinsic interest. Again, fatigue is a matter of considerable importance. In respect to fatigue, I should say that the first signs of restlessness, or arbitrary loss of interest, in a series of stimulations, is sufficient warning, and all attempts at further experimenting should cease. Often the child is in a state of indisposition, of trifling nervous irritability, etc.; this should be detected beforehand, and then nothing should be undertaken. No series longer than three trials should be attempted without changing the child's position, resting its attention with a song, or a game, etc., and thus leading it fresh to its task again. Furthermore, no single stimulus, as a colour, should be twice repeated without a change to some other, since the child's eagerness or alertness is somewhat satisfied by the first effort, and a new thing is necessary to bring him out to full exercise again. After each effort or two the child should be given the object reached for to hold or play with for a moment; otherwise he grows to apprehend that the whole affair is a case of "Tantalus." In all these matters very much depends upon the knowledge and care of the experimenter, and his ability to keep the child in a normal condition of pleasurable muscular exercise throughout.

In performing colour experiments, several requirements would appear to be necessary for exact results. Should not the colours chosen be equal in purity, intensity, lustre, illumination, etc.? In reference to these differences, I think only that degree of care need be exercised which good comparative judgment provides. Colours of about equal objective intensity, of no gloss, of relatively evident spectral purity, under constant illumination—this is all that is required. The variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned—such as condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights, etc.—are of greater influence than any of these more recondite variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness if the colours themselves are equally bright; and lustre may be ruled out by using coloured wools or blotting-papers. The papers used in the experiments given above were coloured blotting-papers. The omission of yellow is due to the absence, in the neighbourhood, of a satisfactory yellow paper.

The method now described may be further illustrated by the following experiments on the use of the hands by the young child.

The Origin of Right-handedness.—The question, "Why are we right or left-handed?" has exercised the speculative ingenuity of many men. It has come to the front anew in recent years, in view of the advances made in the general physiology of the nervous system; and certainly we are now in a better position to set the problem intelligently and to hope for its solution. Hitherto the actual conditions of the rise of "dextrality" in young children—as the general fact of uneven-handedness may be called—have not been closely observed. It was to gain light, therefore, upon the facts themselves that the experiments described in the following pages were carried out.

My child H. was placed in a comfortable sitting posture, the arms left bare and free in their movement, and allowed to reach for objects placed before her in positions exactly determined and recorded by the simple arrangement of sliding rods already described. The experiments took place at the same hour daily, for a period extending from her fourth to her tenth month. These experiments were planned with very great care and with especial view to the testing of several hypotheses which, although superficial to those who have studied physiology, yet constantly recur in publications on this subject. Among these theories certain may be mentioned with regard to which my experiments were conclusive. It has frequently been held that a child's right-handedness arises from the nurse's or mother's constant method of carrying it, the child's hand which is left free being more exercised, and so becoming stronger. This theory is ambiguous as regards both mother and child. The mother, if right-handed, would carry the child on the left arm, in order to work with the right arm. This I find an invariable tendency with myself and with nurses and mothers whom I have observed. But this would leave the child's left arm free, and so a right-handed mother would be found with a left-handed child! Again, if the mother or nurse be left-handed, the child would tend to be right-handed. Or if, as is the case in civilized countries, nurses largely replace the mothers, it would be necessary that most of the nurses be left-handed in order to make most of the children right-handed. Now, none of these deductions are true. Further, the child, as a matter of fact, holds on with both hands, however it is itself held.

Another theory maintains that the development of right-handedness is due to differences in weight of the two lateral halves of the body; this tends to bring more strain on one side than the other, and to give more exercise, and so more development, to that side. This evidently assumes that children are not right or left-handed before they learn to stand. This my results given below show to be false. Again, we are told that infants get right-handed by being placed on one side too much for sleep; this can be shown to have little force also when the precaution is taken to place the child alternately on its right and left sides for its sleeping periods.

In the case of the child H., certain precautions were carefully enforced. She was never carried about in arms at all, never walked with when crying or sleepless; she was frequently turned over in her sleep; she was not allowed to balance herself on her feet until a later period than that covered by the experiments. Thus the conditions of the rise of the right-handed era were made as simple and uniform as possible.

The experiments included, besides reaching for colours, a great many of reaching for other objects, at longer and shorter distances, and in unsymmetrical directions. I give some details of the results of the experiments in which simple objects were used, extending over a period of four months, from the fifth to the ninth in her life. The number of experiments at each sitting varied from ten to forty, the position of the child being reversed as to light from windows, position of observation, etc., after half of each series.

No trace of preference for either hand was discernible during this period; indeed, the neutrality was as complete as if it had been arranged beforehand, or had followed the throwing of dice.

I then conceived the idea that possibly a severer distance test might affect the result and show a marked preferential response by one hand over the other. I accordingly continued to use a neutral stimulus, but placed it from twelve to fifteen inches away from the child. This resulted in very hard straining on her part, with all the signs of physical effort (explosive breathing sounds resulting from the setting of the larynx, rush of blood to the head, seen in the flushing of the face, etc.). The number of experiments in each series was intentionally made very small, from one to twelve, in order to avoid fatigue.

The results were now very interesting. During the month ending June 15th the child showed no decided preference for either hand in reaching straight before her within the easy reaching distance of ten inches, but a slight balance in favour of the left hand; yet she was right-handed to a marked degree during the same period as regards movements which required effort or strain, such as grasping for objects twelve to fifteen inches distant. For the greater distances, the left hand was used in only five cases as against seventy-four cases of the use of the right hand; and further, all these five cases were twelve-inch distances, the left hand being used absolutely not at all in the forty-five cases at longer distances.

In order to test this further, I varied the point of exposure of the stimulus to the right or left, aiming thus to attract the hand on one side or the other, and so to determine whether the growth of such a preference was limited to experiences of convenience in reaching to adjacent local objects, etc.

The deviation to the left in front of the body only called out the right hand to greater exertion, while the left hand fell into still greater disuse. This seems to show that "dextrality" is not derived from the experience of the individual in using either hand predominantly for reaching, grasping, holding, etc., within the easiest range of that hand. The right hand intruded regularly upon the domain of the left.

Proceeding upon the clew thus obtained, a clew which seems to suggest that the hand preference is influenced by the stimulus to the eye, I introduced hand observations into a series of experiments already mentioned above on the same child's perception of the different colours; thinking that the colour stimulus which represented the strongest inducement to the child to reach might have the same effect in determining the use of the right hand as the increased distance in the experiments already described. This inference is proved to be correct by the results.

It should be added that in all cases in which both hands were used together, each hand was called out with evident independence of the other, both about the same time, and both carried energetically to the goal. In many other cases in which either right or left hand is given in the results, the other hand also moved, but in a subordinate and aimless way. There was a very marked difference between the use of both hands in some cases, and of one hand followed by, or accompanied by, the other in other cases. It was very rare that the second hand did not thus follow or accompany the first; and this was extremely marked in the violent reaching for which the right hand was mainly used. This movement was almost invariably accompanied by an objectless and fruitless symmetrical movement of the other hand.

The results of the entire series of experiments on the use of the hands may be stated as follows, mainly in the words in which they were summarily reported some time ago:

1. I found no continued preference for either hand as long as there were no violent muscular exertions made (based on 2,187 systematic experiments in cases of free movement of hands near the body—i. e., right hand, 577 cases; left hand, 568 cases—a difference of 9 cases; both hands, 1,042 cases; the difference of 9 cases being too slight to have any meaning); the period covered being from the child's sixth to her tenth month inclusive.

2. Under the same conditions, the tendency to use both hands together was about double the tendency to use either (seen from the number of cases of the use of both hands in the figures given above).

3. A distinct preference for the right hand in violent efforts in reaching became noticeable in the seventh and eighth months. Experiments during the eighth month on this cue gave, in 80 cases, right hand, 74 cases; left hand, 5 cases; both hands, 1 case. This was true in two very distinct classes of cases: first, reaching for objects, neutral as regards colour (newspaper, etc.), at more than the reaching distance; and, second, reaching for bright colours at any distance. Under the stimulus of bright colours, from 86 cases, 84 were right-hand cases and 2 left-hand. Right-handedness had accordingly developed under pressure of muscular effort in the sixth and seventh months, and showed itself also under the influence of a strong colour stimulus to the eye.

4. Up to this time the child had not learned to stand or to creep; hence the development of one hand more than the other is not due to differences in weight between the two longitudinal halves of the body. As she had not learned to speak or to utter articulate sounds with much distinctness, we may say also that right or left-handedness may develop while the speech centres are not yet functioning. Further, the right hand is carried over after objects on the left side, showing that habit in reaching does not determine its use.

Theoretical.—Some interesting points arise in connection with the interpretation of these facts. If it be true that the order of rise of mental and physiological functions is constant, then for this question the results obtained in the case of one child, if accurate, would hold for others apart from any absolute time determination. We should expect, therefore, that these results would be confirmed by experiments on other children, and this is the only way their correctness can be tested.

If, when tested, they should be found correct, they would be sufficient answer to several of the theories of right-handedness heretofore urged, as has been already remarked. The rise of the phenomenon must be sought, therefore, in more deep-going facts of physiology than such theories supply. Furthermore, if we go lower in the animal scale than man, analogies for the kinds of experience which are urged as reasons for right-handedness are not present; animals do not carry their young, nor pat them to sleep, nor do animals shake hands!

A full discussion would lead us to the conclusion that dextrality is due to a difference in development in the two hemispheres of the brain, that these differences are hereditary, and that they show themselves toward the end of the first year.

It is a singular circumstance that right-handedness and speech are controlled by the same hemisphere of the brain and from contiguous areas. It would explain this—and at the same time it seems probable from other considerations—if we found that right-handedness was first used for expression before speech; and that speech has arisen from the setting aside, for further development, of the area in the brain first used for right-handedness. Musical expression has its seat in or near the same lobe of the brain.

The Child's Mental Development in General.—The actual development of the child, as observations from many sources indicate it, may be sketched very briefly in its main outlines. It is probable that the earliest consciousness is simply a mass of touch and muscular sensations experienced in part before birth. Shortly after birth the child begins to connect his impressions with one another and to show Memory. But both memory and Association are very weak, and depend upon intense stimulations, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. The things which most effect him at these early stages are those which bring him into conditions of sharp physical pain or give him acute pleasure. Yet it is a remarkable fact that at birth the pain reflex is wanting. His whole life up to about the fourth month turns upon his organic and vegetative needs. At three months the young child will forget his mother or nurse after a very few days. Attention begins to arise about the end of the first quarter year, appearing first in response to bright lights and loud sounds, and being for a considerable time purely reflex, drawn here and there by the successive impressions which the environment makes. With lights and sounds, however, movements also attract the infant's attention very early; and the passage from reflex attention to a sort of vague interest seems to arise first in connection with the movements of the persons about him. This interest goes on to develop very rapidly in the second half year, in connection more particularly with the movements which are associated with the child's own comfort and discomfort. The association of muscular sensations with those of touch and sight serves to give him his first clear indications of the positions of his own members and of other objects. His discrimination of what belongs to his own body is probably aided by so-called "double touch"—the fact that when he touches his own body, as in touching his foot with the hand, he has two sensations, one in the foot and the other in the hand. This is not the case when he touches other objects, and he soon learns the distinction, getting the outlines of his own body marked out in a vague way. The learning of the localities on his body which he can not see, however, lags far behind. The movements of his limbs in active exploration, accompanied by sight, enables him to build up his knowledge of the world about him. Learning this he soon falls to "experimenting" with the things of space. Thus he begins to find out how things fit together, and what their uses are.

On the side of his movements we find him going through a series of remarkable adaptations to his environment. At the beginning his movements are largely random discharges, or reflexes of an instinctive character, such as sucking. Yet in the first month he shows the beginning of adaptation to the suggestions of his daily life, the first manifestations of acquired Habit. He learns when and how long he is expected to sleep, when and how much to eat; he very soon finds out the peculiar touch and vocal tones of this person or that, and acts upon these distinctions. He gets to know the meaning of his food bottle, to understand the routine movements of persons about the room, and the results of violations of their order. His hat, wraps, carriage, become in the first half year signals to him of the outdoor excursion. He no longer bobs his head about when held erect, and begins to control his natural processes. The remarkable thing about all these adaptations is that they occur before the infant can in any sense be said to have a Will; for, as has been said, the fibres of the brain necessary to voluntary action—in the cortex of the hemispheres—are not yet formed.

The realization of this extraordinary adaptiveness of the very young child should save parents many an anxious day and sleepless night. There is practically nothing more easy than to impress upon the child whatever habits of daily—and nightly!—routine one wishes to give him, if he be taken early enough. The only requirements are knowledge of what is good for him, and then inviolable regularity in everything that concerns him. Under this treatment he will become as "obstinate" in being "good" as the opposite so-called indulgent or capricious treatment always make him in being "bad." There is no reason whatever that he should be walked with or held, that he should be taken up when he cries, that he should be trotted when he awakes, or that he should have a light by night. Things like this are simply bad habits for which the parents have themselves to thank. The child adapts himself to his treatment, and it is his treatment that his habits reflect.

During the second half-year—sooner or later in particular cases—the child is ready to begin to imitate. Imitation is henceforth, for the following few years, the most characteristic thing about his action. He first imitates movements, later sounds, especially vocal sounds. His imitations themselves also show progress, being at first what is called "simple imitation" (repeating a distinction already spoken of in the chapter on animals), as when the child lies in bed in the morning and repeats the same sound over and over again. He hears his own voice and imitates it. In this sort of imitation he simply allows his instinct to reproduce what he hears without control or interference from him. He does not improve, but goes on making the same sounds with the same mistakes again and again. But a little later he begins what is called "persistent imitation"—the "try-try-again," already spoken of—which is a very different thing. Persistent imitation shows unmistakably the presence of will. The child is not satisfied with simple imitation or mere repetition, whether it be good or bad in its results. He now sees his errors and aims consciously to improve. Note the child's struggles to speak a word right by imitation of the pronunciation of others. And he succeeds. He gradually gets his muscles under control by persistence in his try-try-again.

Then he goes further—about the beginning of his second year, usually. He gets the idea that imitation is the way to learn, and turns all his effort into imitations experimentally carried out. He is now ready to learn most of the great processes of his later culture. Speech, writing, this special accomplishment and that, are all learned by experimental imitation.

The example of the child's trying to draw or write has already been cited. He looks at the copy before him; sets all his muscles of hand and arm into massive contraction; turns and twists his tongue, bends his body, winds his legs together, holds his breath, and in every way concentrates his energies upon the copying of the model. In all this he is experimenting.

He produces a wealth of movements, from which, very gradually, as he tries and tries again, the proper ones are selected out. These he practises, and lets the superfluous ones fall away, until he secures the requisite control over hand and arm. Or suppose a child endeavouring, in the crudest fashion, to put a rubber on the end of a pencil, after seeing some one else do it—just the sort of thing a year-old child loves to imitate. What a chaos of ineffective movements! But with repeated effort he gets nearer and nearer to it, and finally succeeds.

On the side of action, two general principles have been formulated in child psychology, both illustrated in the cases and experiments now given: The one, Motor Suggestion, is, as we saw, a principle of general psychology. Its importance to the child is that by it he forms Habits, useful responses to his environment, and so saves himself many sad blunders. The other principle is that of Imitation; by it the child learns new things directly in the teeth of his habits. By exercising in an excessive way what he has already learned through his experimental imitations, he is continually modifying his habits and making new adaptations. These two principles dominate the active life of the adult man as well.

Personality Suggestion.—A further set of facts may be cited to illustrate the working of Suggestion, now in the sphere of the receptive life. They are important as showing the child's progress in learning the great features of personality.

One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its responses to its environment is the tendency to recognise differences of personality. It responds to what have been called Suggestions of Personality. As early as the second month it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery depends upon the presence of certain kinds of "personality suggestion." It is quite a different thing from the child's behavior toward things which are not persons. Things come to be, with some few exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite, more and more unimportant; things may be subordinated to regular treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important, as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its expressions equal the person in all his attributes.

I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons—an uncertainty aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the "projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal consciousness.

It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little detail.

1. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is movement. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady attention are directed to moving things—a swaying curtain, a moving light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that brings him his bottle, movement that regulates the stages of his bath, movement that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption from pain, is this—movements come to succour him. Change in his bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earliest reflection in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this stage his "personality suggestion" is a pain-movement-pleasure state of mind; to this he reacts with a smile, and a crow, and a kick. Undoubtedly this association gets some of its value from the other similar one in which the movements are the infant's own. It is by movements that he gets rid of pains and secures pleasures.

Many facts tend to bear out this position. My child cried in the dark when I handled her, although I imitated the nurse's movements as closely as possible. She tolerated a strange presence so long as it remained quietly in its place; but let it move, and especially let it usurp any of the pieces of movement-business of the nurse or mother, and her protests were emphatic. The movements tended to bring the strange elements of a new face into the vital association, pain-movement-pleasure, and so to disturb its familiar course; this constituted it a strange "personality."

It is astonishing, also, what new accidental elements may become parts of this association. Part of a movement, a gesture, a peculiar habit of the nurse, may become sufficient to give assurance of the welcome presence and the pleasures which the presence brings. Two notes of my song in the night stood for my presence to H., and no song from any one else could replace it. A lighted match stopped the crying of E. for food in her fourteenth week, although it was but a signal for a process of food preparation lasting several minutes; and a simple light never stopped her crying under any other circumstances.

2. With this first start in the sense of personality we find also the beginning of the recognition of different personalities. It is evident that the sense of another's presence thus felt in the infant's consciousness rests, as all associations rest, upon regularity or repetition; his sense of expectancy is aroused whenever the chain of events is started. This is soon embodied largely in two indications: the face and the voice. But it is easy to see that this is a very meagre sense of personality; a moving machine which brought pain and alleviated suffering might serve as well. So the child begins to learn, in addition, the fact that persons are in a measure individual in their treatment of him; that their individuality has elements of uncertainty or irregularity about it. This growing sense is very clear to one who watches an infant in its second half year. Sometimes its mother gives it a biscuit, but sometimes she does not. Sometimes the father smiles and tosses the child; sometimes he does not. Even the indulgence of the grandmother has its times and seasons. The child looks for signs of these varying moods and methods of treatment; for his pains of disappointment arise directly on the basis of that former sense of regular personal presence upon which his expectancy goes forth.

This new element of the child's sense of persons becomes, at one period of its development, quite the controlling element. His action in the presence of the persons of the household becomes hesitating and watchful. Especially does he watch the face, for any expressive indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression is now the most regular as well as the most delicate indication. Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle sensibility to these differences; and normal children all do. Animals are also very expert at this.

All through the child's second year, and longer, his sense of the persons around him is in this stage. The incessant "why?" with which he greets any action affecting him, or any information given him, is witness to the simple puzzle of the apparent capriciousness of persons. Of course he can not understand "why"; so the simple fact to him is that mamma will or won't, he knows not beforehand which. He is unable to anticipate the treatment in detail, and he has not of course learned any principles of interpretation of the conduct of father or mother lying back of the details.

But in all this period there is germinating in his consciousness—and this very uncertainty is an important element of it—the seed of a far-reaching thought. His sense of persons—moving, pleasure-or-pain-giving, uncertain but self-directing persons—is now to become a sense of agency, of power, which is yet not the power of the regular-moving door on its hinges or the rhythmic swinging of the pendulum of the clock. The sense of personal agency is now forming, and it again is potent for still further development of the social consciousness. It is just here, I think, that imitation becomes so important in the child's life. This is imitation's opportunity. The infant watches to see how others act, because his own weal and woe depends upon this "how"; and inasmuch as he knows not what to anticipate, his mind is open to every suggestion of movement. So he falls to imitating. His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for himself.

It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes. Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes "contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard, and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality. For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.

3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence and another, so now he learns the difference between one character and another. Every character is more or less regular in its irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud, pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no adult is present who has authority or will to punish him. This stage in his "knowledge of man" leads to very marked differences of conduct on his part.

4. He now goes on to acquire real self-consciousness and social feeling. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate heading below.

It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare distinction of persons from things on the ground of peculiar pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests personal agency. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of behaviour or personal characters of different persons. 4. After his sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, he gets what is really self-consciousness and social feeling.

[Footnote 2: It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is curious to note that, besides the general gregariousness which many animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem to recognise dogs by smell. So with cats, which also respond instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem to be guided by sight. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.]

Self-consciousness.—So far as we have now gone the child has only a very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons who move about him. The persons are "projective" to him, mere bodies or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun, as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes about from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of others.

Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others, he finds himself gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same actions with them, to discover what they are feeling, what their motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees his father handle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the child's curiosity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the impulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive of the action.

This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the development of the child; and because of this twofold significance it is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social philosophy.

1. By such imitation the child learns to associate his own sense of physical power, together with his own private pleasures and pains, with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be characteristic of the persons of his social circle, become his, in his own thought. He is now for himself an agent who has the marks of a Person or a Self. He now understands from the inside all the various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer "projective"—simply there, outside, in the environment; it has become what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles.

This is what we mean by Self-consciousness. It is not an inborn thing with the child. He gradually acquires it. And it is not a sense of a distinct and separate self, first known and then compared with other persons. On the contrary, it is gradually built up in the child's mind from the same material exactly as that of which he makes up his thought of other persons. The deeds he can do he first sees others doing; only then can he imitate them and find out that he also is a being who can perform them.

So it goes all through our lives. Our sense of Self is constantly changing, constantly being enriched. We have not the same thought of self two days in succession. To-day I think of myself as something to be proud of, to-morrow as something to be ashamed of. To-day I learn something from you, and the thought that it is common to you and to me is the basis of my sympathy with you. To-morrow I learn to commit the unworthy act which Mr. A. commits, and the thought that he and I are so far the same is the basis of the common disapproval which I feel of him and me.

2. The second result of this imitative learning about personality is of equal importance. When the child has taken up an action by imitation and made it subjective, finding out that personality has an inside, something more than the mere physical body, then he reads this fact back into the other persons also. He says to himself: "He too, my little brother, must have in him a sense of agency similar to this of mine. He acts imitatively, too; he has pleasures and pains; he shows sympathy for me, just as I do for him. So do all the persons with whom I have become so far acquainted. They are, then, 'subjects' as I am—something richer than the mere 'projects' which I had supposed." So other persons become essentially like himself; and not only like himself, but identical with himself so far as the particular marks are concerned which he has learned from them. For it will be remembered that all these marks were at first actually taken up by imitation from these very persons. The child is now giving back to his parents, teachers, etc., only the material which he himself took from them. He has enriched it, to be sure; with it he now reads into the other persons the great fact of subjective agency; but still whatever he thinks of them has come by way of his thought of himself, and that in turn was made up from them.

This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when they speak of the "ejective" self. It is the self of some one else as I think of it; in other words, it is myself "ejected" out by me and lodged in him.

The Social and Ethical Sense.—From this we see what the Social Sense is. It is the feeling which arises in the child or man of the real identity, through its imitative origin, of all possible thoughts of self, whether yourself, myself, or some one else's self. The bond between you and me is not an artificial one; it is as natural as is the recognition of personal individuality. And it is doing violence to this fundamental fact to say, as social science so often assumes, that the individual naturally separates himself or his interests from the self or the interests of others. He is, on the contrary, bound up with others from the start by the very laws of his growth. His social action and feeling are natural to him. The child can not be selfish only nor generous only; he may seem to be this or that, in this circumstance or that, but he is really social all the time.

Furthermore, his sense of right and wrong, his Ethical Sense, grows up upon this sense of the social bond. This I can not stop to explain further. But it is only when social relationships are recognised as essential in the child's growth that we can understand the mutual obligations and duties which the moral life imposes upon us all.

How to Observe Children, with Especial Reference to Observations of Imitation.—There are one or two considerations of such practical importance to all those who wish to observe children that I venture to throw them together—only saying, by way of introduction, that nothing less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitations. The Self is really the form in which the personal influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality.

1. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected the child. This is the more important since the child sees few persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely—it is inevitable—that he make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by imitation, out of the "copy" set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal "copy"—to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree their dispositions are; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits?—they are character!

2. A point akin to the first is this: the observation of each child should describe with great accuracy the child's relations to other children. Has he brothers or sisters? how many of each, and of what age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child has only adult "copy." He can not interpret his father's actions, or his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children, especially to separate off one or two children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next.

3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts—and there is a very great variety of them—an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self—her very personality; it is nothing less than that—utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in the morning, with one other person, a "copy" set before her, as immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room! They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social continence. So impressively true is this from the human point of view that, in my opinion—formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion—friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social exercise.

One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the independence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the best discipline.

4. The remainder of this section may be devoted to the further emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games, especially those which may be best described as "society games." All those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary facility of the child's mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however, to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they were observing in these fancy plays the putting together anew of fragments, or larger pieces, of the adult's mental history. Here, in these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the personal "copy" material which they get from you and me. If a man study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out, he gradually sees emerge from within the inner consciousness a picture of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions he seeks to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there ever a child who did not play "church," and force the improvised "papa" into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy" things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, after they had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this: the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of the parent's life and acts them out; so he grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to perform.

In order to be of more direct service to observers of games of this character, let me give a short account of an observation of the kind made some time ago—one of the simplest of many actual situations which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out together. It is a very commonplace case, a game the elements of which are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find the elementary the more instructive.

On May 2 I was sitting on the porch alone with the children—the two mentioned above, aged respectively four and a half and two and a half years. Helen, the elder, told Elizabeth that she was her little baby; that is, Helen became "mamma," and Elizabeth the "baby." The younger responded by calling her sister "mamma," and the play began.

"You have been asleep, baby. Now it is time to get up," said mamma. Baby rose from the floor—first falling down in order to rise!—was seized upon by "mamma," taken to the railing to an imaginary washstand, and her face washed by rubbing. Her articles of clothing were then named in imagination, and put on, one by one, in the most detailed and interesting fashion. During all this "mamma" kept up a stream of baby talk to her infant: "Now your stockings, my darling; now your skirt, sweetness—O! no—not yet—your shoes first," etc., etc. Baby acceded to all the details with more than the docility which real infants usually show. When this was done—"Now we must go tell papa good-morning, dearie," said mamma. "Yes, mamma," came the reply; and hand in hand they started to find papa. I, the spectator, carefully read my newspaper, thinking, however, that the reality of papa, seeing that he was so much in evidence, would break in upon the imagined situation. But not so. Mamma led her baby directly past me to the end of the piazza, to a column in the corner. "There's papa," said mamma; "now tell him good-morning."—"Good-morning, papa; I am very well," said baby, bowing low to the column. "That's good," said mamma, in a gruff, low voice, which caused in the real papa a thrill of amused self-consciousness most difficult to contain. "Now you must have your breakfast," said mamma. The seat of a chair was made a breakfast table, the baby's feigned bib put on, and her porridge carefully administered, with all the manner of the nurse who usually directs their breakfast. "Now" (after the meal, which suddenly became dinner instead of breakfast), "you must take your nap," said mamma. "No, mamma; I don't want to," said baby. "But you must."—"No; you be baby, and take the nap."—"But all the other children have gone to sleep, dearest, and the doctor says you must," said mamma. This convinced baby, and she lay down on the floor. "But I haven't undressed you." So then came all the detail of undressing; and mamma carefully covered her up on the floor with a light shawl, saying: "Spring is coming now; that'll be enough. Now shut your eyes, and go to sleep."—"But you haven't kissed me, mamma," said the little one. "Oh, of course, my darling!"—so a long siege of kissing! Then baby closed her eyes very tight, while mamma went on tiptoe away to the end of the porch. "Don't go away, mamma," said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't leave her darling," came the reply.

So this went on. The nap over, a walk was proposed, hats put on, etc., the mamma exercising great care and solicitude for her baby. One further incident to show this: when the baby's hat was put on—the real hat—mamma tied the strings rather tight. "Oh! you hurt, mamma," said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't draw the strings too tight. Let mamma kiss it. There, is that better, my darling?"—all comically true to a certain sweet maternal tenderness which I had no difficulty in tracing.

Now in such a case what is to be reported, of course, is the facts. Yet knowledge of more than the facts is necessary, as I have said above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the information which concerns the rest of the family and the social influences of the children's lives. I recognised at once every phrase which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in this process, called in a figure "social heredity." But as that story is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake four-year-old?

Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a more direct lesson—a lived-out exercise—in sympathy, in altruistic self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency, in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to ends—and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we personate other characters? What could further all this highest mental growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily life are read into the child's little self? Then, in the case of Elizabeth also, certain things appear. She obeys without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms. Certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are learned by the same process.

All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty also. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this sort of symbolic representation. Play has its dangers also—very serious ones. The adults sometimes set bad examples. The game gives practise in cunning no less than in forbearance. Possibly the best service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to the proper recognition and avoidance of the dangers.

Finally, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of no use whatever to psychologists—to say nothing of the actual damage you may be to the children—unless you know your babies through and through. Especially the fathers! They are willing to study everything else. They know every corner of the house familiarly, and what is done in it, except the nursery. A man labours for his children ten hours a day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet he lets their mental growth, the formation of their characters, the evolution of their personality, go on by absorption—if no worse—from common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral attendants! Plato said the state should train the children; and added that the wisest man should rule the state. This is to say that the wisest man should tend his children! Hugo gives us, in Jean Valjean and Cosette, a picture of the true paternal relationship. We hear a certain group of studies called the humanities, and it is right. But the best school in the humanities for every man is in his own house.

With this goes, finally, the highest lesson of sport, drama, make-believe, even when we trace it up into the art-impulse—the lesson of personal freedom. The child himself sets the limitations of the game, makes the rules, and subjects himself to them, and then in time pierces the bubble for himself, saying, "I will play no more." All this is the germ of self-regulation, of the control of the impulses, of the voluntary adoption of the ideal, which becomes in later life—if so be that he cling to it—the pearl of great price.



CHAPTER V.

THE CONNECTION OF BODY WITH MIND—PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY—MENTAL DISEASES.

In the foregoing pages we have had intimations of some of the important questions which arise about the connection of mind with body. The avenues of the senses are the normal approaches to the mind through the body; and, taking advantage of this, experiments are made upon the senses. This gives rise to Experimental Psychology, to which the chapter after this is devoted. Besides this, however, we find the general fact that a normal body must in all cases be present with a normal mind, and this makes it possible to arrange so to manipulate the body that changes may be produced in the mind in other ways than through the regular channels of sense. For example, we influence the mind when we drink too much tea or coffee, not to mention the greater changes of the same kind which are produced in the mind of the drinker of too much alcohol or other poisonous substances. All the methodical means of procedure by which the psychologist produces effects of this kind by changing the condition or functions of the body within itself belong to Physiological Psychology. So he modifies the respiration, changes the heart beat, stimulates or slows the circulation of the blood, paralyzes the muscles, etc. The ways of procedure may be classified under a few heads, each called a method.

1. Method of Extirpation.—This means simply the cutting away of a part of the body, so that any effect which the loss of the part makes upon the mind may be noted. It is used especially upon the brain. Pieces of the brain, great or small—indeed, practically the whole brain mass—may be removed in many animals without destroying life. Either of the cerebral hemispheres entire, together with large portions of the other, may be taken from the human brain without much effect upon the vital processes, considered as a whole; the actual results being the loss of certain mental functions, such as sight, hearing, power of movement of particular limbs, etc., according to the location of the part which is removed. Many of the facts given below under the heading of Localization were discovered in this way, the guiding principle being that if the loss of a function follows the removal of a certain piece of the brain, then that portion of the brain is directly concerned in the healthy performance of that function.

2. Method of Artificial Stimulation.—As the term indicates, this method proceeds by finding some sort of agent by which the physiological processes may be started artificially; that is, without the usual normal starting of these processes. For example, the physician who stimulates the heart by giving digitalis pursues this method. For psychological purposes this method has also been fruitful in studying the brain, and electricity is the agent customarily used. The brain is laid bare by removing part of the skull of the animal, and the two electrodes of a battery are placed upon a particular point of the brain whose function it is wished to determine. The current passes out along the nerves which are normally set in action from this particular region, and movements of the muscles follow in certain definite parts and directions. This is an indication of the normal function of the part of the brain which is stimulated.

Besides this method of procedure a new one, also by brain stimulation, has recently been employed. It consists in stimulating a spot of the brain as before, but instead of observing the character of the movement which follows, the observer places galvanometers in connection with various members of the body and observes in which of the galvanometers the current comes out of the animal's body (the galvanometer being a very delicate instrument for indicating the presence of an electric current). In this way it is determined along what pathways and to what organs the ordinary vital stimulation passes from the brain, provided it be granted that the electric current takes the same course.

3. Method of Intoxication, called the "Toxic Method."—The remarks above may suffice for a description of this method. The results of the administration of toxic or poisonous agents upon the mind are so general and serious in their character, as readers of De Quincy know, that very little precise knowledge has been acquired by their use.

4. Method of Degeneration.—This consists in observing the progress of natural or artificially produced disease or damage to the tissues, mainly the nervous tissues, with a view to discovering the directions of pathways and the locations of connected functions. The degeneration or decay following disease or injury follows the path of normal physiological action, and so discloses it to the observer. This method is of importance to psychology as affording a means of locating and following up the course of a brain injury which accompanies this or that mental disease or defect.

Results—Localization of Brain Functions.—The more detailed results of this sort of study, when considered on the side of the nervous organism, may be thrown together under the general head of Localization. The greatest result of all is just the discovery that there is such a thing as localization in the nervous system of the different mental functions of sensation and movement. We find particular parts of the nervous organism contributing each its share, in a more or less independent way, to the whole flow of the mental life; and in cases of injury or removal of this part or that, there is a corresponding impairment of the mind.

First of all, it is found that the nervous system has a certain up-and-down arrangement from the segments of the spinal cord up to the gray matter of the rind or "cortex" of the large masses or hemispheres in the skull, to which the word brain is popularly applied. This up-and-down arrangement shows three so-called "levels" of function. Beginning with the spinal cord, we find the simplest processes, and they grow more complex as we go up toward the brain.

The lowest, or "third level," includes all the functions which the spinal cord, and its upper termination, called the "medulla," are able to perform alone—that is, without involving necessarily the activity of the nervous centres and brain areas which lie above them. Such "third-level" functions are those of the life-sustaining processes generally: breathing, heart-beat, vasomotor action (securing the circulation of the blood), etc. These are all called Automatic processes. They go regularly on from day to day, being constantly stimulated by the normal changes in the physiological system itself, and having no need of interference from the mind of the individual.

In addition to the automatic functions, there is a second great class of processes which are also managed from the third level; that is, by the discharge of nervous energy from particular parts of the spinal cord. These are the so-called Reflex functions. They include all those responses which the nervous system makes to stimulations from the outside, in which the mind has no alternative or control. They happen whether or no. For example, when an object comes near the eye the lid flies to reflexly. If a tap be made upon the knee while one sits with the legs crossed the foot flies up reflexly. Various reflexes may be brought out in a sleeper by slight stimulations to this or that region of his body. Furthermore, each of the senses has its own set of reflex adjustments to the stimulations which come to it. The eye accommodates itself in the most delicate way to the intensity of the light, the distance of the object, the degree of elevation, and the angular displacement of what one looks at. The taking of food into the mouth sets up all sorts of reflex movements which do not cease until the food is safely lodged in the stomach, and so on through a series of physiological adaptations which are simply marvellous in their variety and extent. These processes belong to the third level; and it may surprise the uninitiated to know that not only is the mind quite "out of it" so far as these functions are concerned, but that the brain proper is "out of it" also. Most of these reflexes not only go on when the brain is removed from the skull, but it is an interesting detail that they are generally exaggerated under these conditions. This shows that while the third or lowest level does its own work, it is yet in a sense under the weight—what physiologists call the inhibiting action—of the higher brain masses. It is not allowed to magnify its part too much, nor to work out of its proper time and measure. The nervous apparatus involved in these "third-level" functions may be called the "reflex circuit" (see Fig. 2), the path being from the sense organ up to the centre by a "sensory" nerve, and then out by a "motor" nerve to the muscle.