SA;::I BARBARA 'awr mmt mm ISfe .*. International Cturrati0n < EDITED BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A. M., LL. D. VOLUME XXIV. THE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES. 12mo, cloth, uniform binding. ~pHE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES was projected for the pur- -* pose of bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old, upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and training for teachers generally. It is edited by W. T. HARRIS, LL. D., now United States Commissioner of Education, who has contributed for the different volumes in the way of introductions, analysis, and commentary. The volumes are tastefully and substan- tially bound in uniform style. VOLUMES NOW READY: Vol. I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. By JOHANN KARL FRIED- RICH ROSENKRANZ, Doctor of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at the Uni- versity of Konigsberg. Translated from the German by ANNA C. BRACKETT. Second edition, revised, and accompanied with Commentary and complete Analysis. Price, $1.50. Vol. II. A HISTORY OF EDUCATION.. By F. V. N. PAINTER, A.M., Professor of Modern Languages and Literature in Roanokc College, Va. Price, $1.50. Vol. III. THE RISE AND EARLY CONSTITUTION OF UNIVER- SITIES. WITH A SURVEY OF MEDI/EVAL EDUCATION. By S. S. LAURIE, LL. D., Professor of the Institutes and History of Education in the University of Edinburgh. Price, $1.50. Vol. IV. THE VENTILATION AND WARMING OF SCHOOL BUILDINGS. By GILDKKT B. MORRISON, Teacher of Physics and Chem- istry in Kansas City High School. Price, $1.00. Vol. V. THE EDUCATION OF MAN. By FKIEDRICH FROEBEI. Trans- lated and furnished with ample notes by W. N. HAII.MANN, A. M., Superin- tendent of Public Schools, La Porte, Ind. Price, $1.50. Vol. VI. ELEMENTARY PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION. By Dr J. BALDWIN, author of " The Art of School Management." Price, $1.50. Vol. VII. THE SENSES AND THE WILL. (Part 1 of "TiiE MIND n F THE CHILD.") By W. PKEYER, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated from the original German by H. \V. BROWN, Teacher in (lie State Normal School at Worcester, Mass. Price, $1.50. Vol. VIII. MEMORY : What it is and how to Improve it. By DAVID KAY, F. R. G. S., author of " F.ducation and Educators," etc. Price, $1.50. Vol. IX. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT. (Part II of "TiiE MIND OF THE CHILD.") Py W. PKF.YKR, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated from the original Gi-rman by H. W. BROWN, Teacher in the StHtc Normal School at Worcester, Mass. Price, $1.50. THE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES. (Continued.) Vol. X. HOW TO STUDY GEOGRAPHY. A Practical Exposition of Methods and Devices in Teaching Geography which apply the Principles and Plans of Ritter and Guyot. By FRANCIS W. PARKER, Principal of the Cook County (Illinois) Normal School. Price, $1.50. Vol. XI. EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES: Its History from the Earliest Settlements. By RICHARD G. BOONE, A. M., Professor of Pedagogy in Indiana University. Price, $1.50. Vol. XII. 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By JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART. Translated from the Original German by MARGARET K. SMITH. Price, $1.00. Vol. XIX. PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO THE ART OF TEACHING. By Dr. JOSEPH BALDWIN. Price, $1.50. Vol. XX. ROUSSEAU'S EMILE. By W. H. PAYNE. Price, $1.50. Vol. XXI. THE MORAL INSTRUCTION OF CHILDREN. By FELIX ADLER. Price, $1.50. Vol. XXII. ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS. By ISAAC SHARPLESS, LL. D. Price, $1.00. Vol. XXIII. EDUCATION FROM A NATIONAL STANDPOINT. By ALFRED FOUILLEE, Price, $1.50. Vol. XXIV. MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. By W. PREVER. Price, $1.00. Vol. XXV. HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. By B. A. HINSDALE. Price. $1.50. Vol. XXVI. SYMBOLIC EDUCATION. By SUSAN E. BLOW. Price $1.50. New York : D. APPLET ON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD BY W. PREYER PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN JENA AUTHOR OF THE MIND OF THE CHILI) (PART I. THE SENSES AND THE WILL I PART II. THE DEVELOPMENT OK THE INTELLECT) TRANSLATED FKOM THE GERMAN BY II. W. BROWN TEACHER IN THE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL AT WORCESTER, MASS. M Barara NEW YORK 1). A PPL ETON AND COMPANY 1804 COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U. S. A. LB I I 15 P~7 EDITOR'S PREFACE. THOSE who have studied the careful observations on the growth of the mind in childhood recorded in the two volumes of this series entitled respectively The Senses and the Will and The Development of the Intellect will be interested in receiving from the author, Dr. Preycr, further reports of the results and conclusions which he has reached after time has per- mitted wider surveys of the field, new verifications, and more deliberate reflection upon the data given. The special object of this book, as announced by Dr. Preyer in his preface, is to initiate mothers into this complicated science of psychogcnesis. Accord- ingly lie has taken unusual pains to present the more important points upon which the development of the child's mind depends in a form easy of assimilation. He desires to evoke a widespread interest in the de- velopment of the infant mind, and lead to a multitude vi EDITOR'S PREFACE. of special investigations into the phenomena of the first five years of the child's life. This movement, known as " child study," has re- ceived great impulse in this country within a few years, especially through the labors of Dr. Stanley Hall, who may be called the pioneer and enthusiastic promoter of the good work. Prof. M. W. Hum- phreys, of Tennessee, and Prof. Edward S. Holdeu, of California, published their investigations into the vocabularies of children soon after Darwin published his biographical sketch of his infant son and Taine his essay " Sur 1'Aquisition du Langage." Mr. E. H. Russell, Principal of the State Normal School of Worcester, Mass., was one of the first to commence in his school a systematic collection of data regard- ing the development of children. Eecently, Prof. Earl Barnes, in the Leland Stanford, Junior, Uni- versity, has made large additions to our knowledge of the development of the conceptions of children in regard to art, religion, and some other fields. Every day one comes to hear of some new laborer in this province of pedagogy. The results recorded in this volume are chiefly of three kinds : 1. The order of development of the senses taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight ; the feelings of tempera- ture, the emotions of fear, astonishment, and anger ; the intellect and will, language and self-consciousness. EDITOR'S PREFACE. vii 2. The characteristic marks by which the several phases of these activities are to be discriminated and known. For example, the author makes the intellect begin to manifest itself by placing its impressions in space and time the notions of space and time are said to be added to sensation, thus converting it into perception. When the cause of the perception is ap- prehended the perception becomes an idea. Space, time, and causality are therefore three criteria of the highest order in our investigation of the development of the infant mind in its earliest stages. It is well to understand with the greatest fullness what the develop- ment of the idea of causality means to the mind. It is nothing less than the process of emancipation of the mind from dependence on immediate sense-per- ception. There is first a perception of an object present here and now before the senses. This per- ception is repeated of the same object and of other objects of the same class. By the introduction of the idea of cause the mind comes to understand the mode of production of these individual objects. It under- stands, for instance, that leaves grow on trees as their producing causes ; that fire will bake cakes ; that hu- man beings and many animals produce various sounds with their voices. On seeing an object, a leaf, or a cake, it instantly goes back to the source and through a common cause associates the present object with others of its kind. The act of recognition of its class, v iii EDITOR'S PREFACE. and a consequent anticipation of observation by bring- ing to its aid its stored-up experience regarding the modes of action which the cause of the present object has shown itself to possess this is a step in emancipa- tion from sense-perception. The mind acts less in sense-perception and more in apperception. It spends less time in touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, see- ing, and more in recognizing and identifying what is before it and thereby adjusting it to the aggregate of experience already acquired. This apperceiving or adjusting of the new perception to the perceptions already stored up involves, as we see, first memory, and next thought. Memory brings back to consciousness old percepts and old ideas and thus renders possible the act of comparison of the present object perceived with the absent objects remembered. Thinking or thought deals with the causal principle, and under- stands objects by relating them to the causal processes by which they have originated and are accustomed to originate. The child does much staring and listening and touching compared with the man. The man needs only a first glance or a first note, and he identi- fies and recognizes the sight or sound and at once classifies and places the new object correctly in its process and understands it. He does not need to con- tinue the act of perception so long as the child, for thought, employing the causal idea, has emancipated him to a greater or less degree from mere perception. EDITOR'S PREFACE. i x The causal genesis of objects is of a higher order of being than the objects perceived by the senses. The former contains the latter potentially. A cause is worth a whole series of effects. The hen in the nursery tale that laid the golden eggs was a living causal process, while the eggs were mere dead results or effects. Prof. Preyer will not be thought to lay too much stress on the perception of causality as the crite- rion of intellect, in contrast to sense-perception. In fact, the change from sense-impression to sense-percep- tion by the time and space notions may be said to take place through an unconscious application of causality a causal feeling, so to speak. For the child per- ceives time and space, or objectifies his impressions, by referring them to another source than his own will that is to say, than his own personal causality. From the idea of cause, which is the all-important idea in explaining the genesis of the intellect and the unity of experience, the transition is easy to the idea of will ; for the will is a personal causality. Prof. Preyer makes the act of imitation to be the first sure sign of the development of the will. Imitation shows the consciousness of power to originate motions. It shows, moreover, the act of recognition of the origin of the motion which it imitates in another cause than itself. The child recognizes in some motion the ac- tion of another causality than itself, and it repeats x EDITOR'S PREFACE. within itself this act which it has observed, thus re- producing it or imitating it. The delight which the mother feels when her child first learns to imitate is explained it is the first recognition of the existence of veritable will power, of true conscious self-determination. Parents are apt to speak of cases of stubborn resistance or per- sistence on the part of infants as cases of willfulness, but stubbornness is not a reliable sign of will ; it may be, as in the case of lower animals, a mere instinctive action. Imitation, however, is a sufficient indication of the exercise of the veritable will. And this, of course, must be true of such animals as monkeys, par- rots, dogs, and other animals that can be taught imi- tation they show the rudiments of will. Arrested development at the standpoint of imita- tion, we all know, produces the much despised lower order of human intellects the men and women of mere use and wont blind followers of custom. 3. Prof. Preyer has demonstrated with sufficient clearness the existence of intellect without language. The ideas of space, time, and cause are prior to the ideas that usher in the stage of language. Of course, the influence of language reacting upon the intellect is very great, as Prof. Preyer himself expressly shows. Language may be said to arise from the side of the will, inasmuch as it is an evolution from the imitative activity of the soul. It contains both recognition and EDITOR'S PREFACE. xi reproduction, and thus not only intellect nor mere will, but both will and intellect in joint activity. According to one view, the soul is a product of the organism ; according to another view, the organism is the product of the soul. Both views have scientific value, of course, but, taking the latter view in the in- terest of religion and humanity, we explain every step of building the body, from the embryonic stage up to the mature man, to be the action of a self-determined being taking possession of matter and stamping upon it its own image and giving it the form of organic cells. It uses its organism to attack its environment and gain new means of expression and new means of conquest. Even the plant exhibits to us a self reacting on its environment and assimilating it to vegetable cells. The infant animal shows us reaction upon its environ- ment of two kinds : one, that of using it for food, and a second, that of sensation, in which the inner causal- ity reacts against the environment in such a manner as to produce perception or representation. It is, by analogy, a kind of reproduction of the environment within itself for its own purposes. This is a new and higher order of reaction, breaking out, as it were, against the lower order of reaction, that of mere digestion or assimilation ; for it does not condescend to act on external matter, but tries to reproduce its environment through its own energy. The infant child shows us both these phases of reaction, and also xii EDITOR'S PREFACE. a higher reaction against the two lower in the form of thought. For thought is opposed to mere animal reaction, to mere imitation, representation, or repro- duction of the environment, as well as to mere plant reaction, which is a struggle to convert that environ- ment into cellular tissue. It evidently aspires to free itself altogether from its thraldom to any environ- ment except one of its own make. It does this by appealing to the causality that has made its environ- ment, and dealing with that causality first-hand, in- stead of with its dead results, the objects of sense- perception. Hence, the really human interest in the development of mind is this struggle toward what Immanuel Kant called " transcendental freedom." The ego is itself a transcendental freedom, accord- ing to this second or humanitarian view of the soul ; and most interesting of all phenomena are the strug- gles of the infant child to find in himself, and become conscious of, this transcendental freedom. The most easily observed of these is the adoption of moral ideas whereby the soul renounces the immediate gratifica- tion of the body for the preservation of the integrity of its inner self-determination makes naught of its material environment for the sake of its supersensible ideals. But the rise from the standpoints of sense-percep- tion and loose habits of reflection to scientific habits of mind is likewise a manifestation of the same tran- EDITOR'S PREFACE. x iii scendental freedom. It is the resort to a supreme ra- tional norm in preference to holding by the two lower intellectual activities dominated by the accident of en- vironment, or, in other words, by the temporal interests prevailing. If I allow myself to be controlled in the objects of my perception by the time and place that I happen to be situated in, or in my objects of reflec- tion by my equally accidental environment, I do not possess the scientific habit of mind ; for that chooses its object, and proceeds systematically to exhaust it. The infant child at first is not able to use his body, neither his muscles nor even his brain cells. His de- velopment takes two lines to master the afferent and the efferent nerves. Hidden behind his mask (of the body) at first, he gradually emerges to view. He gets control of his apparatus and develops new apparatus. By his energy and perseverance he gets the use of his muscles and brain cells, and develops new fibers be- tween those cells so that he can associate all manner of data of experience. Unless he acts intellectually his brain cells and connecting fibers will not develop. The ganglionic cells are lacking or very scanty at first, we are told. These develop for the uses of the soul, if it energizes and uses them. Our human interest in the child is in seeing his freedom develop. The growth of the infant is first into freedom in the body, and next into freedom from x i v EDITOR'S PREFACE. the body. By science, philosophy, ethics, religion, politics, art, and literature man is emancipated from the narrow limits of his bodily environment and made a denizen of the world of spirit made a member of the " invisible church." W. T. HARRIS. WASHINGTON, D. C., September 5, 1893. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. MORE than ten years ago I published a treatise on the mental development of the human being in the first years of life, with the title Psychogenesis. The problems touched upon in that treatise were afterward handled in detail in my book The Mind of the Child (Die Secle des Kindes), the first edition of which ap- peared toward the end of the year 1881, and the third edition, revised and enlarged, in March, 1890; and it is not too much to say that this new depart- ment of physiological pyschology is now firmly estab- lished. Investigators in the most diverse special prov- inces of medicine, language, pedagogy, arc turning more and more to the observation of their own chil- dren during just those years in which speech is ac- quired, and we can foresee that at no distant date will appear special text-books upon the physiology and pyschology of the child from the first year to the fifth year of life. But before that takes place a great deal xvi AUTHOR'S PREFACE. more work must be done ; and in particular, a more widespread interest in this subject must be evoked, and where interest already exists it must be aug- mented. For, after all, the observation of mental develop- ment in the earliest years naturally falls to the mother more than to any other person. But in order to initi- ate mothers into so complicated a science as that of pyschogenesis, the results already attained in it must be presented to them in a form as easy of assimilation as possible. Other persons also teachers, both male and female, fathers, older brothers and sisters are to be induced to consider the importance of the facts in this field, which has indeed been lying open for hun- dreds of years, but has been little trodden, and is therefore a new field. For these reasons I shall endeavor, in response to oft-repeated inquiries and requests, to put together some of the more important points upon which the development of the child's mind depends. But here I wish to say expressly that it is impossible to take note of everything that from a scientific or practical point of view would be prominent for example, the growth of the religious sentiment, the development of conscience, the advent of the passions because there is as yet too great a lack of trustworthy and coherent observations. What I have to say has been selected from the pretty extensive and securely grounded ma- AUTHOR'S PREFACE. X vii terial in our possession, with special reference to prac- tical use and application. Of course it is not for every one to confirm by his own observation all my statements of fact ; for it is no easy thing in the case of an individual child who is in active movement, changing every instant the direction of his attention, altering his expression, and babbling unintelligible sounds, to ascertain what is in accord- ance with law. lie only can reach the goal who, with the greatest patience and after preliminary studies in physiology and psychology, occupies himself persist- ently and impartially with several children. Knowl- edge of mankind is not gained by the mere theorizer, but only by him who with ripe judgment and per- sonal experience has intercourse with men. Although the little child shows himself to the observer always without the least dissimulation ini veiled in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word still there is great danger, with the anthropomorphic tendency of most people in their way of looking at things, that more will be attributed to the child than actually be- longs to him. Moreover, knowledge of mankind is not of much help here at first, because everything which at a later period comes forth, obscurely or openly, is now present only in the germ. On the other hand, the observation of untrained animals, especially young ones, and the comparison of the observations made upon them with those made upon little children, xviii AUTHOR'S PREFACE. have often been found by me very helpful toward an understanding of children; and I hope from the com- pletion of a comparative psychology, together with the inauguration of psychogenetic observations, more re- sults than from the prosecution of earlier psychologies of a more speculative sort. As to the foundation of my statements in detail, the reader is referred to the work mentioned at the beginning, The Mind of the Child. ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. The scientific observation of children by their parents has become more common in recent years (p. ix). Much work remains to be done, and the persons who have the best opportunity to do it are the mothers. The object of this book is to initiate mothers into the science of child obser- vation (p. x). The work requires great patience and skill (P. xi). CHAPTER I. The Senses of the Newborn Child. The senses are absolutely necessary to the child for any knowledge of the world into which he is born. If one sense only is lacking, knowledge of one kind must be forever lacking (p. 1). The senses, however, do not furnish knowledge nt once. The child has to learn to use them. Taste first learned. A few days after birth, sweet is preferred to bitter or sour (p. 2). This early de- velopment of taste is of advantage to the child. Smell is mani- ffsted in the first few days by discrimination between agree- able and disagreeable odors (p. 53). The cutaneous sense, which includes the sense of temperature along witli that (if touch, is / imperfect for some days (p. 4). Hearing does not exist at birth. The newborn child is deaf, and for many days he hears imper- fectly. This lack of hearing is advantageous (pp. 5, 0). Sight is not possessed at first. The eye is sensitive to light, but there is no perception of color or form (p. 7). Nature of the field of vision at first (p. 8). Physiological nature of a sensa- tion of light (p. !)). The brain of the infant differs in form from that of the adult. Ganglionic cells arc lacking or very xx ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. scanty. These cells have a very important function in mental development (p. 10). The ability to distinguish between sensa- tions depends on the cerebral cortex. Discrimination of odors and tastes requires practice (p. 11). The same is true of tem- peratures, tones, and colors. There is sad neglect of training in regard to tones and colors. Tests in English schools showed great lack of color sense, yet the children were not color-blind ; they needed practice (p. 12). The author's child showed the necessity of long practice for discrimination of colors. All children are uncertain about colors up to the end of the second year. It is much the same as to tones (p. 13). To know whether a child has an " ear for music," we must give him early opportunity to distinguish tones ; otherwise he may be declared to be unmusical when he is not so. No child should be excluded from instruction in singing and music except after y protracted trial (p. 14). There has been too much neglect of the senses of the infant (p. 15). CHAPTER II. Feelings, Emotions, and Temperaments in In- fancy. The child has bodily feelings of a general character, not at first defined or separated from one another (pp. 16, 17). Hunger and thirst prominent. After weaning, differences in tastes of foods are perceived, and they form a basis for feelings of liking or aversion (p. 18). Sensations through the skin of touch and temperature. In touch, the hands most concerned (p. 19). Lips and tongue very important. Temperature of milk or of bath excites strong feelings (p. 20). Of emotions, the easiest to investigate are astonishment and fear. Compare the#e with similar states in animals (p. 21). In the child, won- der may result in a humane feeling or in some activity of intel- lect (p. 22). The manifestation of astonishment in the child is a good sign ; it ought to appear from the fourth to the sixth month. Fear is a teacher (p. 23). Fear both inherited and ac- quired. Example of the mother has great effect (p. 24). Tem- perament is the chief thing. Fourfold classification of sanguine, choleric, melancholy, phlegmatic, is still of value (p. 25). It rests on a physiological basis. Table showing comparative excita- bilitv and after-effect (p. 26). The sanguine child to be treated differently from the phlegmatic (p. 27). The choleric requires ANALYTICAL TABLE OP CONTENTS. xx i specially judicious regimen (p. 28). Children injured by want of proper care, and by being waked from sleep (p. 29). CHAPTER III. The First Perceptions and Ideas. After some months comes sharp discrimination between sense impres- sions. Intellect already active before speech is acquired (p. 30). First activity of intellect is the " placing " of impressions in space and time. Impressions received simultaneously on differ- ent parts of the skin suggest the idea of space (p. 31). The famous question of Molyneux as to the child born blind but receiving sight through surgical operation (p. 32). The retina of the eye is a skin : sight and touch closely related in the child's mind. Combination of tactual and visual impressions yields the idea of space (p. 33). The brute has at birth a nerv- ous mechanism complete and ready for action; not so the hu- man being. Nativists and empiricists both right. Space intui- tions are innate in the brute ; they are acquired through ex- perience in man. The visual sphere in the brain is not devel- oped in the newborn babe, lie is mind-blind (pp. 33, 34). The ear is the special organ of the time sense ; but all organs are to some degree serviceable here, as impressions upon any one of them may be successive instead of simultaneous. A difference of time is felt (p. 35). Now sensation becomes perception, be- ing defined in space and time (p. 36). When the cause of the perception is apprehended the perception becomes an idea. Ideas are the material of thought (p. 37). Ideas may be sug- gested to the child by adults. On this fact is based the educa- tional principle of "Diverting the Attention " (p. 38). "Sug- gestion " explained. Effects of wrong application of it (p. 39). Evil results of leaving the child too, much with servants (p. 40). The great defect in education is that there is in the first period of life far too little physiological training, and at a later period far too much unphysiological instruction. Possibilities of bet- ter preparation for later stages (p. 41). The principle of divert- ing the attention through suggestion is especially applicable to play. Play resembles the experimenting of the naturalists (p. 42). Newton's comparison of himself to a child at play has deep significance (pp. 42. 43). Great strain of intellect of the child in piny (p. 43). The child discovers and invents (p. xx ii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTEXTS. 44). Playthings of poor and rich. Sifting of them is needed ; other danger than that of poisonous colors (p. 45). Few plays better than many. Influence of play on character (p. 46). Children not to be disturbed when playing harmlessly, nor hin- dered, by precepts, from teaching themselves (p. 47). CHAPTER IV. Origin of the Will. Our destiny determined largely by our will (p. 48). Contrast between the will-less babe and the man of will. The change may be traced almost step by step. The only sign of will is muscular movement. But the child makes many movements before it has will (p. 49). Classification of movements necessary (p. 50). Impulsive move- ments (p. 52). Reflex (p. 53). Instinctive (p. 54). These all involuntary. Imitative movements involve an idea of the movement imitated. The first successful imitation is a proof of will (p. 55). Will depends on ideas, these on perceptions formed out of sensations. Hence the importance of allowing the in- fant freedom and opportunity to experience sensations, percep- tions, and ideas, and to practice imitation. On the other hand, he should be guarded against bad ideas. Education begins with the first hour of life. But it is in poor hands for the most part (p. 50). Harm done by preventing the natural unfolding of the will by needless prohibitions (p. 57). Practical sugges- tions as to early training (p. 58). Importance of health of brain ; of sparing the senses, and of exercising them (p. 59). The child at first his own teacher ; later, taught by others. In both cases he learns by sense-impressions, which excite motor ideas, which result in willed movements. Theory of desire as spring of voluntary movements unsatisfactory (p. CO). The crying of a hungry babe is not caused by desire of food but by physical discomfort. Why ho cries from discomfort (pp. 61, (52). The child's first attempts to control natural movements show advance in growth of will (p. 64). But inhibition must be urged with caution (p. 05). CHAPTER V. The Child's First Learning. Error of suppos- ing that the first learning requires a teacher and the use of language. The child learns at first by sense-perception (p. 06). Pictures less useful (p. 67). Only through his own sensations can the child learn colors, tones, etc. (p. 68). Thinking can not ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xxin be taught by words, although the highest development of it is attained by instruction through language (p. G9). Consequences of one-sided education, either all language or no language (p. 70). Physiological view. Certain areas in the brain concerned with special intellectual activities (p. 71). If these centers are not developed, the intellectual activities are lacking (p. 72). True in various arts (p. 73). Facts in regard to animals born blind or deaf (p. 74). Bearings on education. Influence long exerted in one exclusive direction deforms the brain and prevents har- monious culture (p. 75). Evil consequences in form of nervous diseases (p. 76). Importance of li letting alone " in infancy (p.77). Physiological deficiencies of the brain of the infant (p. 78). Too early strain dulls the faculties (p. 79). Learning to think consists in understanding the simple elements of the sense-impressions. Discrimination takes time. The child discriminates between ideas' (p. 80). Likenesses more easily apprehended than differences, and more agreeable ; hence the child's instinct for classifying (p. 81). This involves comparison, the basis of all thinking! When children compare objects, they arc thinking (p. 82). De- velopment of thinking like that of the animal in the egg (p. 8:3). CHAPTER VI. Intellect without Language and Language without Intellect. The notion that there can be no thinking without, language is disproved by mere observation of the child (p. 84). Examples of thinking without words (pp. 85, 80). The child surpasses the most intelligent animals in thinking, though he may know less of language (p. 87). Answer to objection that the child's superiority is owing to his hearing language. Case of those who have no verbal language (p. b'8). Ideas must pre- cede language; without them development is slight, as in chil- dren growing up in solitude (p. 89). Forest-children (pp. 90- ;)2). These creatures show the need of language for full devel- opment (p. 93). Language alone, however, does not insure de- velopment of intellect: nor does superior knowledge of words show superior thinking power in the child (p. !I4). Learn- ing of language requires: first, a plastic brain; second, influ- ence of human beings (p. {).-. The ideas that must precede lan- guage are gained mostly by observation of looks and gestures (p. 90). Child watches movements of persons (p. 9 1). Winking ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. at the approach of something to the eye marks an advance in cerebral activity (p. 98). Holding up the head indicates incipient thinking (p. 99). Other movements that are a kind of language without words (p. 100). Imitative movements show delibera- tion. The child's looks and gestures show that he has ideas, combines and separates them, before he can speak (p. 101). CHAPTER VII. The Learning of Speech. How it was with us before we could speak we can not tell ; and the speechless child can not tell how it is with him (p. 103). Need of special observations of the period in which language is acquired (p. 104). Pleasure in such observation (p. 105). The child must not be aware that he is observed. The child's first cry has no signifi- cance as language, but his later crying has, to some extent (p. 106). The first syllabic utterances (ma, ba) are not language until to- ward the end of the first year (p. 107). Apparatus required for speech diagram (p. 108). The speech-center not at first devel- oped in the brain. The child learns to speak by imitation, as he learns to write (p. 109). Complicated process of vocal language (p. 111). Association of sound with some experience. The idea of that experience is called up by the sound, and then the idea prompts the reproduction of the sound. First word of Prof. Preyer's child (p. 112). Correct use of words gained gradually (p. 113). Original word-formation not easy to observe (p. 113). Bad effects of "baby-talk" (p. 114). Children imitate peculiar- ities and defects of speech (p. 115). Resemblance between the child's defects and those of adults disabled by disease or injury (p. 116). The brain needs development through growth and exer- cise. The meaning of words is learned largely through gestures and looks (p. 117). Sounds are made in superfluity at first; then a selection is made (p. 118). A few sounds are first in all languages. Explanation of this (p. 119). Differences in indi- viduals caused by differences in environment (p. 119). Number of words used by the child at end of the second year. Need of extensive observation (p. 120). Heredity not very important here (p. 121). Essential elements in the origin of language (p. 122). CHAPTER VIII. The Formation of Higher Ideas. The first words of the child do not show that he has attained general ideas (p. 123). Words help him to discriminate between his ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. X xv ideas, but he must yet make use of memory and association. Difference between memory for words and memory for things (p. 124). The child's memory in a single department of sense is weak. Experiment of Prof. Mark Baldwin (pp. 125, 126). A word awakens memory of previous experience ; an experience similar to the former recalls the word (p. 126). This makes pos- sible the rise of a higher idea. The old word does not quite suit the new idea, and the difference needs to be designated ; and the difference is abstract (p. 127). The child uses language chiefly for the expression of his own experiences (p. 129). Higher con- cepts are mostly imparted to him by his elders, and usually too early (p. 130). Hugo Goring's view that the child should first learn to understand his own experiences. Folly of making the child learn by sheer strain of memory what has no meaning for him (p. 131). Physiological nature of the rise of concepts and of association of ideas (pp. 132, 133). In age the nerve connec- tions fail from weakness ; in childhood they are not yet estab- lished (p. 134). Remarkable identity of first concepts in all children, yet no ' innate ideas." Explanation of it (p. 135). Sensations connected with food are most important. The natu- ral tendency to think must produce like results under like con- ditions (pp. 136, 137). All children at first think alike ; later, differences appear (p. 138). Compare the development with that of the egg (pp. 139, 140). CHAPTER IX. Development of Self-consciousness. Need of observation of the child at the period when he is learning to dis- tinguish himself from other things (p. 141). No reason for supposing self-consciousness to be given nt birth (p. 142). An undivided self-consciousness doubtful (p. 143). Child's attitude toward his own body. How he becomes acquainted with.it (p. 144). It is at first a foreign object (p. 145). Sight and touch combine to give acquaintance with it (pp. 146, 147). A seeing self and a feeling self anda hearing self (p. 148). Smell and taste less important (p. 149). Experience of pain very important. Perma- nence of the self-consciousness when it has been acquired (p. 150). Connection of higher nerve centers in the brain with lower ones in cervical and spinal marrow. Each of these centers lias its own consciousness (p. 151). Only the lower centers operate at xxvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. first; the newborn child is not yet rational (p. 152). The lower centers act for themselves in some respects all through life (p. 153). The cerebral center the great regulative activity. With development of this the child becomes responsible for his action, has a conscience (p. 154). Different grades of consciousness. Cerebral cortex regulates motor impulses coming from sensory spheres in the brain. This highest consciousness not strictly unitary (p. 155). ^- CHAPTER X. Conditions of Mental Development. Sense- i/fictivity in general. Feeling. Special sensations. Intellect begins with the co-ordinating of sensations in time and space. Perception. Cause of the perception being found, an idea is generated. The sense-percept becomes through abstraction a concept. Combination and separation of ideas is thought (pp. 157, 158). The child gets motor ideas by observing other persons. lie learns to inhibit impulsive and other natural movements, and to imitate movements and vocal sounds. The will particu- larly shown in learning to speak (p. 159). Error of supposing lan- guage necessary for the existence of intellect. Speech a develop- ment of gesture. The human race lias passed through the ex- perience of the child. The formation of concepts greatly ad- vanced by language (p. 160). Language should not be forced on the child in order to give him concepts ; his brain is not enough developed for these (p. 101). Fundamental rules for the first learning : Spare the organs of sense and exercise them (p. 162). Talk sensibly with the child that is learning to speak (pp. 162, 163). Development of self-consciousness begins with acquaintance with the body. Different centers act independent- ly at first (p. 163). In the blending of the different elements that make the self, heredity is powerful. But education may do much. Development of brain dependent on what is pre- sented to the senses. Example of Laura Bridgman (pp. 164- 167). A physiological pedagogy will work by selection of visual and other impressions to develop good tendencies and check evil ones (p. 168). Too much is done that is unphysiological ; too little that is physiological. Mothers may do much, if they know enough and will not leave children so much in the hands of ignorant persons (p. 169). ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. CHAPTER I. THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN" CHILD. THE senses are the only gate at which the world enters the mind of man. If that gate is closed, he is not properly in the world, is not in connection with it ; the world does not exist for him ; the case is the same as in dreamless sleep. In fact, if a man is de- prived of one single sense his whole view of the world is changed. Blind or deaf persons, who lack from their birth one of the two principal senses, can not rise to the height of intellectual development that seems attamable, as a matter of course, for the nor- mal child even in play. For the blind man, in his view of things, misses not only impressions of light and color, but also the forms of objects beyond his grasp ; while letters, printed books the memory, as it were, of educated man are accessible to him only in a very slight degree. He is like the climber who can not get up for lack of means. And the deaf? 2 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. His world-view lacks not only tones, the entire realm of music and song, but speech, the living word, the very thing that binds man to man and holds together, through a common intellectual life, all who share a higher culture. Any compensation that can be af- forded through the senses of touch and sight is, even with the greatest pains, far from adequate. It is, then, important above all to keep open the two higher senses in earliest youth. The newborn child enters a world of light and sound, but he can not yet see or hear. He does not feel, in the degree that he will feel at a later time ; single pricks of a needle often produce not the least expression of pain in him, and in the first moment of existence he can not properly smell or taste. All this he must first learn. In this matter it is singular enough that the last- mentioned sense, taste, is universally the first to be learned. At any rate, only a few days pass before newly born children distinguish sour, bitter, or salt from sweet. The taste of sweet is plainly preferred at the very beginning. The little countenance, after the wetting of the tongue with glycerin or with a con- centrated solution of sugar, wears almost invariably an expression of satisfaction. But let the tongue be touched with a solution of quinine, warm and not too much diluted, or with common salt, or let it be smeared with a crystal of tartaric acid, and movements THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN CHILD. 3 of repulsion readily appear, accompanied with chok- ing, with screaming, and with an expression of ex- treme displeasure on the face. It is true that alterna- tions of mimetic expression are frequent in the very first period of life, so that the conscientious observer must often be in doubt whether the various tastes are really correctly distinguished. The nervous apparatus in general is, in fact, not yet fully developed. The nerve extremities in the delicate taste-bulbs of the tongue, the gustatory-nerve fibers, the gustatory sphere in the brain, as yet lack exercise, practice. But that these portions work rightly earlier than the other or- gans of sense is certainly of great advantage to the young child as well as to the newborn mammal, be- cause thereby the discrimination between wholesome food and harmful is made possible early, and soon be- comes very much more acute. For the same reason, the surprisingly rapid devel- opment of the faculty of smell in the newborn human being must likewise be of advantage to him. Directly after birth, indeed, and often for several days, the child is not able to distinguish with certainty, at every trial, between substances of agreeable and those of disagreeable smell. Very often he mistakes some- thing he am smell for something to eat e. g., he will suck steadily at the fragrant hyacinth. Still, it is probably possible for him by the sense of smell alone to distinguish the breast of the nurse from that of his 4 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. mother, and the milk of the cow from the milk of the breast, before it touches his lips, as early as one day after birth. At any rate the normal child can smell many things rightly when a few hours or, at most, a few days old ; for his countenance changes in a very marked manner when ill-smelling substances are of- fered to him, or when he is put to a breast that is disagreeable, whereas he has an expression of satis- faction when smelling good milk and a clean skin. The third of the lower senses, so called the cuta- neous sense is developed much less rapidly, although the nerves of the skin are very excitable from the first. The distinction between cold and warmth, and between different kinds of contact, is extremely im- perfect in the first days of life. That the child cries in a batli too cool for him does not show that the water is felt as cold, but merely as uncomfortable, just as warm water produces very early a most content- ed expression. The discrimination that comes later through the sense of temperature, the preference of contacts that occasion an agreeable feeling of warmth, the dislike of washings that occasion the disagreeable feeling of cold, can be developed only by practice, through alternation of the two opposed impressions, which alone makes comparison possible ; and without comparison there can be no discrimination between cold and warmth. How little ability the child has at the beginning to distinguish strong pressure from THE SENSES OF THE NEWBORN CHILD. 5 weak, a grip or thrust that hurts from a mild one, the cold, wet hand from the warm, dry one, we discover by touching the surface of the body at all possible places ; for the child does not resist, does not make even the most ordinary defensive movements of a reflex character at the unpleasant impressions, nor does he smile at the pleasant impressions. All these distinctions in the province of the cutaneous sense are the result of very frequent repetitions of changes in the external impressions received during the child's waking hours. Xow, inasmuch as the human being in the first period of his life is asleep much more than he is awake, the time that remains for him daily for learning to distinguish these impressions is rather short, and accordingly the period of learning is long. This is true particularly of the higher senses, sight and hearing, on the development of which most de- pends. Every child when just born is completely deaf, and sometimes several days elapse before the tympanum, with the auditory ossicle, is capable of conducting external impressions of sound properly to the brain, which is as yet by no means sufficiently developed for hearing. And even when these days have passed, the hearing must be called very bud. A difficulty of hearing continues to exist normally for a long time, and this peculiarity is of great benefit to the child ; for, if lie were able to hear as well as an adult, he 3 6 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. would be altogether too much disturbed just in that first period of life when he needs to rest most of the time, in order to further the processes of nutrition, the forming of fat, the solidification of the bones, the regulation of the respiration and of the activity of the heart. He would be frightened in his sleep, too, and exposed to violent movements, even to convul- sions.' Still, there are children who as early as six hours after birth indicate by a movement of the eye- lids a certain capacity for hearing when unusually loud noises are made close to the ear. Whether in this case the movement of the lid is to be regarded as occasioned by the sound alone, or possibly by the current of air, must be uncertain. The latter would seem unlikely, inasmuch as all adult human beings, without exception, while they wink involuntarily at a loud report or other sudden noise, do not wink at a noiseless current of air, except when it is very strong. In any case, no child is able to hear, out of the many thousand loving words its mother speaks in the first weeks of its life, more than single, loudly uttered ones; and as to understanding them, of course that is out of the question. But the child becomes in this way accustomed to its mother's voice, and there- fore at a later period recognizes that more easily than other voices. With the sense of sight in the newborn child the case is in many respects much the same as with the THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN CHILD. f sense of hearing; for, although the child does not, like puppies and kittens, come into the world with the eyelids tightly closed, and can not be called blind in the strict meaning of the word, yet he is quite in-- capable of seeing. During far the greater part of the day the eyes are actually closed, or the opening of the lids is very small. Closer observation shows, however, that as early as a few minutes after birth a contraction of the pupil takes place upon the en- trance of moderately bright light. This shows that there exists already sensibility to light. By so simple an observation is proved incontestably the permeabil- ity of the entire nerve-path from the retina through the optic nerves to the central portions, from 'these back through the motor nerve of the eye, the o&ilg- motorius. It is easy, also, to convince one's self that very bright, dazzling lights occasion, even on the first day, if the eyes are open, a close shutting of the lids; while, on the other hand, moderately bright surfaces cause the aperture of the lids to widen to the extent of a millimeter. Such facts demonstrate ' that sensibility to light exists in the human being from the very beginning, in contrast with several of the mammals. But no color whatever can be distinguished from any other, nor are boundary lines, intervals, or forms perceived. The whole field of vision makes a con- fused mass of bright and less bright portions, in 8 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. which, in general, only the grosser differences of lu- minosity are perceived. The field of vision at the beginning of life re- sembles a chart, placed close to the eyes, upon which the colored, the bright, and the dark parts of the surface blend with one another so that nothing is dis- tinctly apprehended. It is idle, therefore, to dispute whether the newborn infant sees an object single, not double, with his two eyes ; or whether he sees it upright, or upside down; or whether he confounds right and left in the field of vision. In reality he sees no objects at all yet, and is very slow in learn- ing to distinguish between above and below, left and right, near and far, by means of the motions of things, by the movements of his own eyes, and by his at- tempts to seize objects. The alternation of brighter and darker is not observed until it takes place with larger surfaces and with a certain rapidity not ex- cessive or deficient unless the bright is dazzlingly bright, like the flame of a lamp. In the latter case the brightness is felt at once, for it occasions a quick shutting of the eyes. Where this shutting does not take place in the very earliest period, there is, in fact, a doubt as to the normal constitution of the eye and of the portion of the nervous system belonging to it. In every sensation of light, therefore, including, of course, the first one of the newborn child, we must make a threefold physiological distinction : first, the THE SENSES OF THE NEWBORN CHILD. 9 excitement of the extreme end portion of the optic nerve, the retina in the back part of the eye ; second, the propagation of the excitation through the fibers of the optic nerves to the very complicated central por- tions ; third, the transformation of the nerve-excita- tion into a sensation of light in these portions. All the three constituents of the nerve-excitation that produces the sensation of light the peripheral in the eye, the conductive in the nerve, the central in the brain may be lacking at the beginning of life ; and it is evident that those children who do not react at all upon strong light must be suspected either of not having normal retinas, or of not being sufficient- ly developed as to the conducting fibers of the optic nerve or the portions of the brain belonging thereto. In fact, the development in the case of children born from four to six weeks too soon is generally behind- hand, and the extraordinary sluggishness with which they respond to the most various external impres- sions, the slowness with which they learn to see i. e., to interpret their sensations of light gives rise to the conjecture that in particular their visual sphere, the upper back part of the cerebral cortex, is the most in arrears. The brain of the newly born differs from that of the adult at first view, apart from the small- ness of it, in the smoothness of its superficies. It does not, indeed, lack the principal fissures and con- volutions, but they are shallow, in part barely recog- 10 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. nizable, while the secondary and tertiary fissures are as yet almost totally wanting. Not till the fifth week, according to the investigations of Sernoff, are the accessory sulci and convolutions present. The brain of the newborn child is a sort of imperfect model of a human brain in reduced proportions, needing yet a good deal of carving, chiseling, and polishing ; and microscopic investigation acquaints us with great differences between the two, in reference to the cor- tical layer of the cerebrum, which is to be looked upon as the material substratum of all higher men- tal activity. This is the so-called gray matter of the brain, and it is called " gray " because in comparison with the conducting white or medullary substance it actually looks gray, on account of the predominance in it of ganglionic cells. These it is which, along with their conducting fibers, are still lacking in the newly born, or are present only in very small quan- tity, whereas after six weeks their presence can be more easily demonstrated. Later, when the brain is fully grown, the number of them amounts probably to several hundred millions. I by no means intend to assert that the ganglionic cells are the sole or even the chief agents of all the higher intellectual processes ; for children without these cells manifest certain signs of mind, and much intelligence is found in animals with very few gan- Hionic cells. But it is certain that in man these cells THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN CHILD. H increase with extraordinary rapidity as his mental de- velopment increases ; and we are forced to attribute to them an important rule in all cerebral functions, perhaps that of assisting nutrition. Possibly, indeed, it is they that effect the fresh formation of the proto- plasm that spreads itself, as the intellectual develop- ment goes on, more and more in extraordinarily fine fibers, like a network, in the gray substance ; and pos- sibly this is the true substratum of the mind, and hence the " seat of the soul." However this may be, no distinction of the sensa- tions in any department of sense can be supposed to take place without the development of the cerebral cortex ; and even when the cortex is superior in qual- ity and the external conditions are the most favorable, it takes much practice to acquire in any department of sense a discrimination of sensations that comes any- where near the acuteness attained by the ear of the musician. Who can distinguish from one another the various sensations of smell that, in youth as well as in later life, crowd in upon us in overwhelming number? They can not be indicated by language; the child does not learn to name them ; nobody is interested to designate for him the agreeable and the disagreeable odors as accurately as tones are named in instruction on the piano. It is the same with the sense of taste, certain sensations of which all through life, as in child- hood, are very frequently confounded \\ith sensations 12 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. of smell. How common it is for people to speak of foods and wines as having a good taste, which in real- ity have no taste at all, but simply an agreeable aroma ! Finally, as to the cutaneous sense. For tempera- tures, in the discrimination of which we are not spe- cially instructed, we have only the few terms, hot, warm, lukewarm, cool, cold, and must then resort to the thermometer. But for the various sensations of contact and the muscular feelings we have no ther- mometer ; and the terms we use, thrown together in- discriminately, such as rough and smooth, hard and soft, wet and dry, pointed and blunt, relate much more to combined sensations of touch and muscular sense than to contact alone. As to tones and colors, also, there is a sad neglect of training in discrimina- tion and accurate naming, in the great majority of families. A number of children in the English schools have been tested in reference to their color-sense, and it ap- pears that an unexpectedly large fraction of them were wholly incapable of telling correctly the funda- mental colors which differ most from one another viz., red, green, blue, and yellow, or of naming the degrees of luminosity, " white, gray, and black," al- though the tests were easy ones. To infer from this that such children are color-blind would be altogeth- er inadmissible. They are unpracticed ; their retina is normal, the optic nerve normal, but their visual THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN CHILD. 13 sphere is unpracticed. They know the words that name colors, and they have the sensations of color all right, but they do not know which words and colors belong together. They do not understand their own sensations of color. This is the way it is with the little child. I put color-tests to my child for a series of years. Before he could talk, he was unable to distin- guish green and blue as surely as red and yellow, and white and black ; and he confounded green and blue with gray, and at a later period he confounded their names. In regard to their color-sense, all children who have not had special training in this direction show great uncertainty up to the end of the second year, and even in the third year they often waver in judg- ment to such a degree that they might be supposed to be color-blind. But where this ignorance of colors continues into later life, it is very often the result not of organic defect in the child but of neglect on the part of the parents. In many respects the case is similar with tones. Xo child whose organ of hearing is normally con- structed is born absolutely unmusical. Here, again, the deficiency in discriminating tones, and sensations of sound in general, may be owing to deficient exer- cise of the central portion in the brain, particularly of the auditory sphere, which receives the excitations that come from the ear through the auditory nerves, 14 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. bringing with them sensations of sound. We can never tell whether a child is absolutely unmusical un- less we give him opportunity, and early opportunity, to distinguish tones. Do this, and it is soon apparent whether he is to have a musical ear a thing depend- ent mainly on practice and whether he has a sense for melodies and thus a memory for successions of tones. For he will very early begin himself to sing ; often much earlier than to talk, if these natural gifts, favored in some degree by heredity, are strongly em- phasized in him. But if opportunity is lacking in earliest youth for the discrimination of tones, if the child has no exercise of his own vocal cords, beyond his babbling to himself, if some heed is not very early given to his hearing, his case may easily be like that of children pronounced to be color-blind who have never been taught to distinguish colors. He will be declared to be without talent and utterly unmusical, when he is not so. An absolute lack of the musical ear, and hence of ability to distinguish tones of a certain pitch, is always an anomaly, a sort of deafness either inborn or ac- quired, just as much as the inability to distinguish certain colors is an anomaly. It is therefore to be de- sired that in schools of little children, unless there are imperative reasons of an external character, no child shall be excluded beforehand from instruction in sing- ing and music, but only in case he makes no progress THE SENSES OP THE NEWBORN CHILD. 15 at all after a somewhat protracted trial. We can not, indeed, go so far as did the great English naturalist, Thomas Young, at the beginning of this century, when he declared that every healthy human being can learn everything that any human being has ever learned. But that there has been too much neglect in the opposite direction in regard to the development of the senses of the newborn numan being, is certain. CHAPTER II. FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, AND TEMPEKAMENTS IN INFANCY. BESIDES the five special senses which deal with ex- ternal impressions, there are, as we know, in the adult human being general senses also, through which we have feelings of the body e. g., of pain and pleasure, discomfort and comfort, feelings of a general charac- ter in a word, general feelings. The newborn child doubtless brings with him into the world, already de- veloped, the nerves indispensable to such feelings, s> , feelings that are aroused by internal stimulus. For who would deny that the child becomes thirsty through the enormous loss of water in exhalation of breath and through the skin ; and that crying, which ceases immediately when milk of the right kind is given him, is a sign of discomfort, and discomfort arising from the need of nourishment ? The voice of the little child is, even at a very early period, a differ- ent one when he cries from hunger from what it is when he cries from pain. But although such differ- TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 17 ences in bodily feelings assert themselves at the very beginning of life, yet a separation of them like that in the adult is certainly far from complete ; in fact, dur- ing later life no human being gets so far as to separate all his general feelings as sharply from one another, and to designate them by words and signs such as notes or numbers as he does in the case of colors and tones, and to locate them definitely in his body as he does the impressions of taste. I have in mind here not merely headache, neural- gia of the face, inflammations, stomach-ache, side- ache, nausea, from which little children whose health is generally good may suffer like adults, although they can not tell their suffering : I mean also feelings not in the least related to diseased conditions, such feelings as hunger and thirst, satiety and disgust, fatigue and sleepiness. How hard it is to separate the members of these couples from each other in the grown person ! In the little child these feelings are yet more like waves pouring over one another, and no- body takes the pains to bring them separately to the child's consciousness, because no one, not even the incorrigible hypochondriac, is really well informed in this department of general feelings. Meanwhile it is of peculiarjnterest to the observer to trace the manner in which the sense-impressions that throng in upon the little child in prodigious abundance gradually lead to definite sensations and to 18 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. higher feelings connected with these, within the prov- ince of the special senses. We note very early that the foreground is occupied by nourishment. The hungry child is indifferent to everything else until his hunger is appeased. During his greedy feeding, all attempts to divert his attention it is not till late that we can direct his attention at all from the gratifying of his demand for food are at first almost absolute failures. And inasmuch as during the first few mouths hunger and thirst are naturally always appeased simultaneously by milk alone, it is conceivable that here first the faculty of sensuous discrimination is developed to some degree of acuteness. After the weaning from an exclusive diet of milk has begun, the differences in taste of the first kinds of food given are perceived by the child with surprising accuracy. To be sure, the fact that a flavor of salt, a little ginger or lemon-juice is already enough to call forth defensive movements as signs of refusal, does not authorize us to infer the existence of emotions of aversion, disappointment, anger ; for even the child born without a brain makes, under the same circumstances, the same defensive movements with just as strange grimaces, and likewise puts out the tongue and shuts the eyes tight. But these gusta- tory reflexes at any rate form the necessary basis for the later appearance of emotions in the department of taste ; gustatory feelings, one might say, which, as we TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 19 know, readily express themselves upon the features of adults, and are with difficulty controlled. The case is similar as to differences not to be expressed in words, in the smell of foods for the infant chiefly in the smell of milk. In this respect the adult human be- ing remains, in fact, for the most part on the plane of the infant all his life long, although the feelings of sympathy and antipathy, evoked by the sense of smell, are often unconquerable, and may play an im- portant part. The olfactory lobe in the human brain is small in proportion compared with that of most mammals, and remains backward because the interest in sensations of smell is much slighter in the human than in the brute world. Blind and deaf children have, notwithstanding, a finer sense of smell, presum- ably, than those who are in possession of all the senses, because, when one sense is lacking, the organs of the others get a better development on account of more frequent use. The sensations experienced by the little child through the skin fall very early, no doubt, into two well-marked groups : sensations of touch and sensa- tions of temperature. In the first group the chief office is performed by the hands, which are obliged to master a disproportionally greater variety of impres- sions than are all other portions of the body, particu- larly the feet. The lips and the tongue are the only parts that might vie with the finger-tips for the pre- 20 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. cedence. In sucking, which is the chief occupation of every human being during his first half year, and which, in fact, has given him his name of " suckling," the sensory nerves of the lips and tongue have an extraordinary amount and degree of exercise. Here is the source of the greatest enjoyment, no matter whether the child is lying at his mother's breast or is provided with a nursing-bottle : upon this is concen- trated all the incipient intellectual life, and hence it seems natural that new objects, if small and portable, should be put into the mouth, or at least brought to the mouth, as soon as the child can seize with sure- ness, after the lapse of the first three months. The temperature of the object touched is, however, of great importance here. If milk is but a little too cool or too warm, it is refused. If the water of the bath is a single degree cooler than usual, or if it is considera- bly warmer, then the child, who is unfortunately too much spoiled in this regard here in Germany, screams as if a wrong had been done him, or as if he were frightened, and he may very early make movements of desire that leave no doubt of the existence of unpleas- ant feelings caused by too great coolness or warmth. Nevertheless, it is not possible to determine with certainty the date of the child's first emotions proper. Comparatively the easiest to investigate in little chil- dren, with reference to their physiognomic expression and their psychogenetic significance, are fear, in its TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 21 two forms of anxiety and fright, and astonishment. It is instructive to compare with them the correspond- ing states in animals. When the bird-dog is aston- ished at the flames the first time a fire is made on the hearth in his master's room, or when he is terrified by the bursting of a soap-bubble floating in the air, or when he wonders at the movements of a fan, which seems to vanish on being clapped together and to ap- pear again when opened, he is in the situation of the little child in whom that which is incomprehensible (in a literal sense, that which can not be grasped or prehended,) arouses astonishment; but the difference between the human being and the brute is, even at this early stage, an immeasurable one. For the first astonishment of the child leads on to the careful consideration of a countless number of sense-impres- sions, each one of which gives to his little brain a special stamp, as it were ; and later these all com- bine, as memory-images, to form new thoughts. The brute, on the contrary, stops at simple astonish- ment, and this is speedily diminished with repetition of the same impression. Even the child of complete- ly normal development is certainly dulled by repeti- tion of similar impressions : these lose the stimulus of novelty that excites astonishment, but not without leaving behind them memory impressions that con- tinue to be influential ; and the older the child, the more do impressions of another kind, whifh are far 22 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. too subtile to be noticed by a brute, produce the most enduring effects by exciting the child's astonishment. For instance, wonder is caused by the sight of a lame beggar who has fallen in the snow and is receiving help from a stranger, or by the feeding of an animal. Through such experiences not only is pity stirred, but in some children the foundation is laid for some virtue, like benevolence, generosity, unselfishness, after the original astonishment has been overcome. On the other hand, wonder at simple but to the child unin- telligible phenomena, such as the flying of a bird, the creeping of a snail, the falling of a plaything from the table, the rebounding of the ball when it is thrown against the wall, must arouse the activity of the intel- lect. The search after the cause of the unintelligible falling when the ball rolls off the table, and of the equally incomprehensible bounding when it is thrown from the hand, continues with many children for weeks, and even for months. This school of astonishment every human being must go through for himself. A child incapable of wonder, not dull, though supposed by superficial judg- ment to be so, yet not originally endowed with sensi- bility to the degree common in youth can not under any circumstances be expected to have a normal intel- lectual and moral development ; for it is owing to as- tonishment, ultimately, that a new impression of sight or sound, and in less degree an impression of touch, * TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 23 temperature, smell or taste, acts very strongly on the sense-mechanism concerned. The sensation brings in its train unusually keen and lively feelings. These feelings are manifested in the case of astonishment by fixed, wide-open eyes ; at a later period, by raising of the eyebrows in addition ; often the forehead is wrin- kled, the mouth opened, the whole body motionless, the arms retaining exactly the same position as before the impression was made, while there is a silence that would be called " speechlessness " if the infant were capable of speech. When this image of astonishment is exhibited by a child at insignificant things phe- nomena long since become indifferent to grown people the parents have reason to be glad of it. This phase of psychogenesis ought to be reached in the second quarter of the first year, or at latest toward the end of that period. If it comes much later, or not at all, then the after development of the intellect must also be abnormal, because all our knowledge is matured through our sense-impressions; and when these are deficient, there is an irremediable lack, just as when the excitability of the nerves of sense is inferior or wanting. Fear, too, is one of the mightiest teachers during childhood ; and if it were not too often called forth by ignorant nurses and maids needlessly and unwarrant- ably, just for entertainment, with no educational pur- pose by the pretense of " the black man, 1 ' by shutting 24 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. up in a dark room, by sudden seizure from behind, and the like assuredly a much larger proportion of people, and particularly of women, would be less easily thrown into a fright at trifling occurrences than is the case now. A distinction is to be made between inher- ited and acquired fear, both of which manifest them- selves in the child by the same external signs. For when an invincible antipathy to certain animals e. g., pigs, cats, dogs, and even doves shows itself at the first sight of them, in the fourth month of life, in in- dividiial children, it is not easy to show how this fear can have been acquired. The child does not know that there is danger, and yet he is afraid. A little later he will tremble, grow pale, draw down the cor- ners of his mouth decidedly, cower, cry out, or make movements for flight, at seeing and hearing a steam engine, the shrill whistle of which is of itself enough to set many an infant into a fit of screaming. This effect can not be the result of education any more than can the fear of falling the first time a child tries to walk alone, or the dread of the ocean a fear that per- sists even when the sea is smooth and almost noiseless, at the ebb. Timid and affected mothers have timid and affected children, for the reason that their own behavior, their frequent startings, outcries, flights, are imitated. In like manner courageous mothers have courageous chil- dren, because by their own conduct they exert an edu- TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 25 cational influence ; and here, as in all departments of education, to be an example is of far more worth than to give good instruction or to reward and punish. But there are children who of themselves, apart from any influence, good or bad, of those nearest to them, are easily frightened ; and there are others who are hard to frighten. Timidity depends on temperament, and temperament, through the excitability of the nerves of sense and the capacity of the central nervous organs, determines substantially whether the impressions re- ceived by the organs of sense shall persist for a long or a short time, with intensity or with less tenacity. These varieties of aptitude and of organic memory are the basis of the distinction I have elsewhere dis- cussed in detail (in my university lectures) between the four temperaments a distinction that was made nearly two thousand years ago the different tempera- ments being classed as the sanguine, the choleric, the melancholy, and the phlegmatic. These may be dis- cerned very early in the great majority of children in the second quarter of the first year, beyond a doubt. But external circumstances may have much more ef- fect than at a later period in the adult in causing the amalgamation, as it were, of one of these temperaments with another, so that the one may, to a greater or less degree, make good what is lacking in the other; and for this reason the ultimate character of the mature man can never be predicted from the behavior of the 26 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. child in the first three years. " Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined," is doubtless true, but what we are concerned with here is the period before the bending. And it is of practical importance in this matter to know that the four temperaments, which have for a long time been accepted without any one's being able to say why, may be distinguished in ad- vance quite naturally on physiological grounds. In two of them the excitability, and therefore the sensi- tiveness to impressions of various kinds, is great ; in two of them it is small. The first is the case with the choleric and the sanguine, the second with the mel- ancholy and the phlegmatic. Again, the duration of the after-effect of every impression, the tenacity with Avhich the memory-image is retained, is, in the melan- choly and the choleric, surprising, the organic change in the brain accompanying it being probably consider- able ; in the other two, the sanguine and the phleg- matic, this effect is slight. Thus we get the following classification, which is especially to be borne in mind in our judgment of the child no less than in our judg- ment of the growing youth, in connection with educa- tion, and particularly in the forming of character and in instruction, both physical and intellectual : Excitability. After-effect. Sanguine Great. Small. Phlegmatic Small. Small. Choleric Great. Great. Melancholy.. Small. Great. TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 7 Considering the numerous transitions from one temperament to another, the connection between them all, and the difficulty we find, in spite of the perfection attained in the art of physiological experimentation by means of measure and number, in maintaining dis- tinctions in quantity and degree, this view can not, of course, as yet be established physiologically in its de- tails. I have rather come to it through observation of men in the world and of little children in the nursery. It is at least of value in judging of the child's naturel, and of his intellectual development as far as that can be foreseen. An uncommonly lively child, who turns his head at every noise, moves his eyes restlessly, directs his at- tention now hither, now thither, cries a good deal, and when he learns to walk does not stay in any one place more than a few moments a child, i. e., of decidedly sanguine temperament ought to be guarded care- fully against unnecessary stimulation. lie should be accustomed to moderate light and to stillness, and from the beginning should not be noticed by members of his family, and by other children, as much as his opposite, the child that is slow, that takes little or no notice of his surroundings, but sleeps much and un- interruptedly for a long time the phlegmatic child. What would, in the case of the former of these chil- dren, lead to an aggravation of his mobility, to convul- sions and other disturbances of development, is just 28 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. the thing needed in the case of the latter, viz., fre- quent change in his plays, stimulation by means of light and sound, much cold air and cold water, in order that his natural heaviness may be to some extent combated. Now, as to the choleric child. How important it is for the mother to know that a boy who, when very young, without sufficient cause goes into violent fits of passion, in which he strikes out with arms and legs or stretches himself out rigid and stubbornly inflexible, frightens his mother by a congestion that announces itself with an alarming flush of the skin of the Avhole scalp, ought not to be treated with violence or blows ! Such a child in the moment of extreme rage should be left alone, and be observed, without his knowledge, from a neighboring room. When a child in such a state of excitement gives notice of the coming on of one of his " spells," by shutting his eyes firmly, " squar- ing " his mouth and uttering most disagreeable screams, the best thing is to leave him at once to himself upon a blanket on the floor of the room. Often lie will be- come quiet in a surprisingly short time in the absence of other persons, whereas all well-intended attempts at consolation are likely to call forth a fresh outbreak of passion. I am acquainted with many cases of such screaming children of genuine choleric temperament, who by means of rational training have been entirely cured of this fault. TEMPERAMENTS IN INFANCY. 29 Sometimes, unfortunately, children by no means disposed to such abnormal freaks are transformed for the worse by inexcusable fault on the part of the members of the family or of nurses. For example, a child quietly sleeping is waked in order to be fed ; or is allowed to cry uninterruptedly in the night without being once looked after to find out what is the mat- ter with him ; or he is swathed too tight. Not only is the physical development disturbed considerably by such preposterous actions, but the character, too, which unfolds itself very early, is spoiled. The wak- ing of young children, in particular, I regard as ex- traordinarily harmful in both these directions. Chil- dren wake after proper rest, on account of hunger, and almost invariably give notice of the fact by their voice, no matter what temperament they are of. It would not be difficult to make out a full list of simple principles of training for the first year of life, upon the basis of the varieties of temperament as here indicated; but I have to pursue the development of the child's mind in another direction, and therefore must dismiss this matter here. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AXD IDEAS. Ix contrast with the first period of life, there ap- pears in the child, after some months, a keen dis- crimination of many kinds of contact, of different temperatures, and (by means of the muscular sense) of various degrees of pressure. The warm and wet, the damp and cool, the dry and warm, the dry and cold, the rough and hard, the soft and smooth, the heavy and the light these and other distinctions are now felt, as may be seen in the child's actions when he avoids or seeks things, and in his countenance, the expression of which can not be described, and is hardly to be reproduced in picture. Psychologically considered, this discrimination in the sense-impressions is the more important, in that it is attained at a time when as yet the child gives no hint whatever in the direction of naming his feelings in words of articulate speech. The intellect lias al- ready developed to some extent without any regard to words at all, even to words heard from other per- THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 31 sons ; for deaf and dumb children do not differ essen- tially in this respect from normal children in the first months. But that the intellect is really active in the discrimination of all these sense-impressions is proved by the ordering or arranging of them in space and time. The first act of the human intellect consists in the ordering of the impressions made upon the organs of sense upon the skin first, and then upon the eye. When the simultaneous impressions in all depart- ments of sense, which form the raw material of all experience, are arranged with regard to their relations to one another i. e., their differences, along with complete likeness in kind and degree we call the re- sult space. The intuition of space is so firmly grown into our brain that we are quite unable ever to get rid of it after this ordering activity has once begun. Even in the most profound derangement of mind this function persists. Two impressions of light, equally bright, of the same color, just alike in form and re- ceived at the same time, are distinguished in all cases only by their locality. Things show themselves to us ever beside one another, above one another, or behind one another. Xo fourth location exists, except in thought. We always find a difference in our own body between left and right, above and below, before and behind ; and even in the sphere, on the surface of which all points are alike, we are constrained, how- 32 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. ever often we turn it, to recognize just these three dimensions and these three only, by virtue of our inherited organization. These relations of space the child learns learns through his own experience exclusively, through fail- ures in seizing objects, through errors of vision, through hits, falls, movements of the eyes and head, and through the perception that objects become brighter or darker as they are near or distant. In this way, and by degrees always, does the great difference become plain between a surface and a solid body that is too far off for him to touch. The question, so much mooted by philosophers for two centuries, put by Molyneux to Locke whether a child born blind, but receiving sight by means of a surgical operation, would be able at once to distinguish a sphere from a cube by the eye alone was indeed correctly answered in the negative, but not on satisfactory grounds. It was as- sumed that the difference between these objects would be learned, like the difference between a flat plate and a globe, solely through the sense of touch ; and the in- ference was made that in looking at different forms the perception of differences of form comes only through the recollection of the sensations of touch. Correct as the assumption was, the inference is not satisfactory ; for a great many forms are cognized as different by the eye alone, where there is no possi- bility of employing the sense of touch. The rainbow THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 33 can not be touched, nor the moon, yet they appear round to the child very early the first flat, the sec- ond spherical in the telescope ; and to assume that both kinds of roundness are possible for him only through the remembrance of round things touched, as balls, must be called far-fetched, at least. As chil- dren born blind and never acquiring sight learn to distinguish differences in the form of bodies, so chil- dren with normal vision can equally well perceive the inaccessible heavenly bodies, and far-distant ob- jects on the earth, as differing in form, merely by the sense of sight and the practice that goes with it. The retina of the eye is a skin, too, and of a sort in which the nerve-endings are much more closely crowded together than in the ordinary skin. Al- though objects do not touch this visual skin, it comes in contact with the vibrations of ether that go out from them, which we call rays of light merely because they produce the sensation of light. How nearly re- lated sight and touch must be in the child's mind is manifested in this, that little children, at the time when they are learning to seize objects, often carry new ones, grasped for the first time, not to the mouth, but, strangely enough, to the eyes, as if they wanted to put the things into the eyes, or into one eye. Through the combination, then, of tactile and visual impressions, as well as through the separation of these from each other, the space-intuition is acquired. 3 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. slowly, gradually, as little by little the fact becomes manifest that for all the senses it is one and the same space in which the impressions are co-ordinated. What the chicken just out of the shell can do dex- terously viz. pick up a grain of corn, seeing it at once in its right location this the child must take several months to learn. With the animal, as soon as it comes into the world a completely developed nervous mechanism begins to act. In the human being the mechanism is not yet complete, but requires impres- sions from without that it may be perfected. Thus we see that the two contending parties of nativists and empiricists the first regarding all space-intui- tions as innate, the second maintaining that these are acquired by experience are both in the right. For in the creature that sees well from the start but can not learn to see much better in later life, the nervous visual apparatus is on hand, innate ; on the contrary, in the being that is learning for years to see better and better, this apparatus is at birth incomplete, not ready made, exists in part, as a potentiality simply, but is extremely plastic, and is in fact less the periph- eral eye than it is the cerebral tract belonging to that the later visual sphere, or area, where the retinal images are interpreted and the elements of the future intuition of space are collected together. This por- tion of the cerebrum, which the physiologist Hermann Munk, of Berlin, first understood in its true signifi- THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 35 cance, after years of experimenting upon animals this tract, the destruction of which produces blindness, though the eyes may be uninjured, is not developed in the newly born human being as it is in the chick- en. The newborn child is mind-blind I might say "space-blind." He has a sensation of light, but he can not see, can not perceive anything in space. The ear contributes very little to the development of the space-intuition ; it is the organ of the time- sense. It discriminates with marvelous accuracy, when practiced, to the two thousandth of a second in tones. But in effect all the organs of sense are organs of time, only that they are less perfect ones. Two sensations belonging to different departments of sense can never come into consciousness at exactly the same time. Never simultaneously, but only successively, can two impressions on precisely the same place in a sentient surface be perceived as such. Two stars represented at once on one retinal element appear as a single star, even if they are millions of miles apart; two simultaneous needle-pricks on the same spot of the skin appear as one prick ; and so of all the senses. But if two equally original, simple, pure sensations two lights, two tones, two pricks, in one and the same place are apprehended as twofold, then the child apprehends one of them after the other, before a third, in the place where the impression is made, be it the surface of the skin or the field of vision, or the field 36 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. of audition i. e., the difference between them is time. But when this takes place the child has had not merely a sensation but a perception. The very young child has no time-sense. This begins to develop with his first' perception. Perception differs from sensation essentially in the accession of the spatial and the temporal. " I perceive something," a thing, an occurrence, means, strictly speaking, " I have co- ordinated a certain sensation, sharply, clearly, per- fectly defined from every other, with reference to space and time." The place of a luminous point, the direction of a line, the extension of a surface, or of a body that the child distinguishes from a mere surface by feeling of it, the changing of the place of a point, of a line, of a surface, or a body in a word, motion all these results of the co-ordinating activity of intellect make out of sensation a constituent part of higher cerebral activity which necessitates the de- velopment of mind. But with bare perception of the things that pre- sent themselves continually about us, and to us, and in us in such variety and abundance as not to be mastered the chief step in knowledge is not yet taken. And although the child in his first months in regard to the most of his sense-impressions does not go beyond mere perceiving, any more than does the brute, yet in the case of some of his impressions he is very early led to the further step, necessary to THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 37 all higher intellectual development, which first makes the perceptions available for thought, the highest fu7iction. This step is the search for the cause of what is perceived. For example, after a green oval surface has been seen on the left, above, in the field of vision and at a certain moment i. e., has been perceived then little by little appears the higher function of the brain, through which the leaf of a tree is recognized as the cause of this visual perception. Now the perception becomes an idea. A sensation defined as to time and space i. e., a perception which becomes through the accession of the cause an object of knowledge we call a representation, or an idea, or a thought. Ideas are the exclusive con- tents of the whole higher intellectual life. The combination and separation of them is the work of thought ; the origination of them is the product of experience and hereditary endowment, and of the imagination that is dependent on both ; the destruc- tion of them is the consequence of failing memory. " I have an idea of something." This sentence denotes the act of assigning a cause for my percep- tion, no matter whether this cause is demonstrable or remains a pure product of the imagination. The fact that an idea is suggested again and again by experience is not a reason for its being correct, and no province of observation is more instructive in this respect than the very one that comprises the mental 38 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. activity of the child, because here we find more easily and more frequently than elsewhere in human life the errors made in the search for the cause. A num- ber of examples of this have been given by me in my book on " The Mind of the Child " ; and I will here simply remind the reader of the well-known trick practiced by mothers and nurses, of blowing with the breath upon the place where a child has hurt him- self. The pain passes off, and the child, who regards the blowing as the cause of the betterment, will after- ward blow even when the place where he has been hit is the back of the head, where the current of air can not possibly reach. That the pain ceases in both cases is purely the consequence of the suggestion that it is gone. On this is based one of 'the most impor- tant principles of education, one that concerns the control of the child's ideas. I like to call it the " Principle of Diverting the Attention." This principle, highly important in all mental de- velopment, is in the time of greatest sensibility, in earliest youth, decisive in its application. For in the bright mirror of the child's mind good and bad images are certainly produced easily by the mother ; and although both kinds are partially obliterated in the course of further development, yet they persist for a longer or shorter time, according to the strength of the suggestions of the separate ideas implanted or co- ordinated, and according to the power of memory. THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 39 " Suggestion " is not quite the same thing as inoc- ulation or persuasion ; these words give the meaning only partially. The special characteristic of the sug- gestive method is not the persistent introducing or im- pressing of a certain train of thought alone, but above all the associating firmly with this of an occasion for doing or not doing some specific thing. It has been spoken of in detail by me on other occasions, because suggestions play a great part elsewhere also, and their chief importance is yet to appear, particularly in the practice of medicine. We are at present concerned with the determining influence of the suggestive man- agement of the child in the first period of life. It is, to be sure, impossible in the intellectual de- velopment of a child, even if one were to try by means of punishment, to do away with the three previously designated elements time, space, cause or even to alter them by persuasion ; but it is very easy to connect wrong names with them, so as to make confusion. If any one were disposed, for example, to exchange the names of the points of compass and to teach the child that east is west, the child would still learn to point out correctly the quarter of the heavens in which the sun rises, but he would name it wrong. If such senseless attempts were continued, lie would become uncertain, not so much in the use of his intellect as in the use of his memory in the selection of words and signs. It is much the same in the domain of morals. If from the 40 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. beginning false ideas as to mine and thine, the per- mitted and the forbidden j. e., right and wrong are given to the child, as is unhappily the case too often, through ignorance, then his moral ideas become waver- ing. And it is frequently found to be no longer possible, in later life, to repair the damage completely, because a strict self-education can not be attained without previ- ous education through others. For this reason I have always lamented that in cultivated families the chil- dren should be left much alone with uneducated nurses, maids, bonnes, unless the educated parents oc- cupy themselves with the child to the same or a greater degree in order to furnish the requisite counterpoise. The fathers have other claims upon them ; the mothers are in too many cases hindered by so-called "duties" of society, or by needless journeys. When a child grows up from the beginning under the influence of the suggestions of cultivated people, he must take with him, into the period in which the nursery is left behind forever, a considerably less number of naughty ways and a great many more excellences. He will then, of course, be able to offer less resistance to the later endeavors of his trainers and teachers than if these naughty ways had first to be unlearned, and these excellences, such as obedi- ence, had to be bred in him afterward. The greatest defect in our European education at the close of the nineteenth centurv consists in this : that in the first THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 41 period of the life of the young there is far too little physiological training, and at a later period far too much unphysiological instruction. And yet it would be possible, by means of an extended and systematic use of the principle of diverting the attention through suggestions without words, to prepare, even in the period from the end of the third to the beginning of the tenth month, for the subsequent education through words, so as to give a prospect of permanent results. To do this we must carefully and perseveringly repeat, at fitting times, those suggestions that are helpful toward harmonious development. On the other hand, unphysiological means of quieting and of amusing are to be strictly forbidden. For instance, the inexcusable violent rocking in the cradle and baby-carriage, which puts the babe into a dazed condition, in order that he may not trouble those that have the care of him, is extremely injurious. The brain is slung this way and that in the skull, which is still open at the top ; yet if a grown person were to be tossed about in his bed to quiet him, as I have often seen children rocked in cradles and baby-carriages, he would indignantly re- sent such rough treatment. This is not the place for going into details concerning the earliest suggestions of a wholesome sort, such as occupying the attention of the child, when it is unoccupied or improperly occupied, by rubbing with a warm, dry, soft, smooth hand, by exercising his senses little by little without 42 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. wearying him ; and, further on, by kindly but decisive language, by looks and gesture or a significant glance. I desire now simply to indicate the great importance of this principle of education, which is indeed much employed but not systematically enough in general the diverting of the attention through suggestions. Nowhere does it recommend itself more than in the play of children. A satisfactory theory of play is still wanting, and yet a man does not learn through any kind of instruction or study in later life anything like so much as the child learns in the first four years of his careless existence, through the perceptions and ideas acquired in his play. What seems to adults unworthy of the slightest attention in childish play, is to the child himself of the highest significance, be- cause it has the charm of novelty. A piece of wood, strings, nutshells, utterly worthless things, like peb- bles, leaves, or the contents of a waste-paper basket, acquire a great value through the extraordinarily live- ly imagination of the child, which transforms bits of paper into cups, boats, animals, and men ; and as I have previously spoken of the experimenting of little children as play, I may now mention the internal re- semblance of their procedure to that of the naturalist. "When the great Xewton was asked how he had ever managed to make the extraordinary discoveries with which he astonished the world, he gave the an- swer, since become famous, that he seemed to himself THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 43 to have been only like a child who had been playing on the seashore and had had the luck to find now and then a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than his playmates. That he had worked, had been restlessly, intensely active, had combined, and analyzed, to the great neglect of his health, to forgetfulness of his meals of this he said nothing. We easily overlook in like manner the great intel- lectual strain connected with the early play of chil- dren. How much there is of combination i. e., of putting together ! how much of analyzing or taking to pieces of tangible things ! how much of construc- tion and destruction ! how much investigation, per- sistent penetration accompanied with great muscular effort, into the interior of things that are shut up ! The passion for unveiling the veiled, for getting at the concealed, for finding the reason why things hold to- gether, the cause of a noise, the cause of an effect of light in a word, the insatiable, hereditary appetite for causality in man this it is which finds its first satisfaction in childish play. Hence come feelings of pleasure, and the removal of the discomfort occasioned by ignorance. But what else is it that urges the thinker and investigator in all departments of science to his self-forgetful exertion ? If the pain of hunger and thirst has at all times induced men as well as beasts to get rid of these disagreeable consequences of the lack of food, so, too, at all times the discomfort at- 44 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. tending the lack of knowledge that is to say, the long- ing to still the unconquerable hunger for causes has urged children as well as adults to a higher, an intel- lectual labor. The fact that this kind of labor leads to victory in the struggle for existence more surely than does mere physical activity, is not at all a con- scious motive in the matter. Play makes the child happy : work makes happy the learned man. By such a parallel the value of the activity of the learned man, or better, of the investi- gator and thinker, the discoverer and inventor, is not in the least depreciated. We simply put a higher esti- mate on the activity of the playing child, who in his primitive fashion likewise discovers and invents. lie concentrates his attention for a long time on one and the same object ; he can busy himself for half an hour with a rudely carved horse : on the other hand, he de- sires change of activity, after which he will go back to his former occupation, which no longer offers him novelty, but remains attractive in his remembrance because it was once new. As early as the first half year, the naturcl, the particular nature of the child, is distinguished by such individual differences. But what a schooling the child goes through in his play, in one or the other of these ways of acting, has not yet been by any means investigated psychologically. The children of poor families help themselves out by means of natural products that cost nothing, and of THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 45 the ruined toys of the richer ; while the children of the rich have at their disposal the most costly ma- chines, models, whole arsenals of weapons, museums of dolls with houses to live in, shops, and the like, in a superfluity that is not justifiable. The toy-shop profits by it, not the child. The child that grows up amid a superfluous abundance of playthings easily becomes blase and dissipated ; at any rate, he is not any more happy than the peasant child who has small provision made f"- him, but lives more in the open air. The regulation of the activity of the bruin demands, pre- cisely ir/ -ae first years, a careful sifting of the play- things to be put into the child's hands. It is utterly absurd to choose always " the newest," and it is better to make a selection of a few playthings or games that are suited to the understanding of the little one, than to heap up indiscriminately all sorts of gay, noisy, fragile, and speedily useless toys on big tables at Christmas eve. People do consider, to be sure, whether the colors of the bright playthings are or are not poisonous ; but few persons reflect whether the mind of the little child may not be harmed by overexertion in his imitation of the occupations of adults. The child should not be distracted, his en- ergy should not bo dissipated^ but he should learn betimes to exercise that function of the brain which is most important for his later life, that of directing his attention, of his own motion, persistently toward 46 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. a definite end. This he learns far better to do by means of thoroughgoing occupation with two plays than by the rapid alternation of many, which easily confuses the mind and spoils by satiety the naive joy in the simple. There is, further, in regard to play, the neces- sity, even in the case of the smallest child, of tak- ing into consideration the influence of the play npon his character. Give him opportunity to find out how things are, for himself, without too much cor- rection or help, through searching and trying, pull- ing and turning the parts of his miniature world, and we give him opportunity not only to strengthen himself in a measure by his own experience, to de- velop his judgment through the exercise of his senses, but also to obtain a personal conviction as to what is true and what is not true, instead of echoing thoughtlessly an opinion not his own. Every step he takes on this road is worth far more to him than the corrective ideas too often forced upon him at too early an age. For that which one has seen for himself usually impresses itself more deeply than what one learns from others ; and the old proverb, " Bought wit is best," has special force in application to the play of children. A mere command to let this or that alone has by no means the lasting effect of a single experi- ence of one's own. When my child had a single time put his finger into the flame of the candle he never THE FIRST PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 4? allowed that tiling to happen again ; whereas, before this, the taking away of the burning candle when he was attracted by it, only strengthened his desire for it. Children ought not to be disturbed when they are playing harmlessly, without imperative reasons. They should not be hindered by too many well-meant good precepts from teaching themselves through their own perceptions. This self-teaching not only enriches their knowledge and augments their ability, but forms their character, particularly when there are several children together and one of them shows himself su- perior to the rest. Still, this influence of play does not make itself felt until a later period, which I will not now consider, for fear of being too diffuse. Before that period arrives several important phases of the development of the child's mind are to appear. The will manifests itself after the first clear ideas of movements have been formed, and the origin of that is now to be explained. CHAPTEE IV. THE OBIGIN OF THE WILL. THE human will is the greatest power on earth. It can not, indeed, oppose a direct check to the rude force of Xature, but it can raise itself above this, and enable man to be prepared for everything, so that he is not taken at unawares by sudden misfortune, death, or destruction. The ancient saying, that spirit rules matter, applies, above all, to the power of the human will, which removes mountains, joins oceans, over- comes distances on the earth by steam and iron, and cosmic distances by putting itself into communication, by means of a ray of light, with the most remote heavenly bodies. It is man's will, too, that shapes his destiny. His career in life is determined chieily, not by accidental circumstances, by environment or by education, but by his own will. Is he weak, does he submit to the will of another, then he lacks self-deter- mination ; then lie should not be surprised if he does not get on according to his notion, but goes like the ball that is thrown. " Man makes his own destiny," THE ORIGIN OP THE WILL. 49 and " Every man is the founder of his own fortune," only through his own will. Hence it is of fundamental importance, and is profitable in a practical point of view, for every one to know how the will originates, is developed, and is perfected. A greater contrast can hardly be imagined than exists between the babe, which lies absolutely helpless, without will or intellect, and the man into whom it is transformed the man in the prime of life, in the thick of the contest with others, growing stronger and stronger, and possessing a firmly established character. Nevertheless, it is not merely a possible thing to ob- serve the metamorphosis, step by step as in the prov- ince of morphology we have accurately traced the changes of the germ slumbering in the egg up to the hatching of the fowl, which, unlike the egg, is a crea- ture having motion of its own but numerous obser- vations have actually been made in this direction. In order to discover the origin of will in the child, we must first of all know how will may be recognized. Xow, the only sign of will that we can find is muscu- lar movement. It is by movements solely that the child can manifest his will. Yet lie makes lively movements before he has a will ; therefore we must inquire into the difference between willed movements and those first movements that are made without will. In order to do this we must look to the causes of the 50 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. movements, must ascertain which among the great number of causes are absolutely lacking in the earliest period, and are then separate from all others because they bring after them the voluntary movements of the child. Now, the causes of movements that lead grad- ually to the development of the child's will are ideas, and first of all ideas of movements. It is therefore very important to make an accurate classification of all the movements of the child, in or- der that we may separate from the others those aris- ing from ideas. A division merely into voluntary and involuntary movements is of no advantage, for the very thing to be found out is how the voluntary come forth out of the involuntary. That the voluntary movements exist from the beginning is no longer maintained by any one. The newborn child has ab- solutely no will any more than the unborn ; yet, like the unborn child, it makes numerous aimless, pur- poseless, irregular movements. Symmetrical muscular contractions of a remarkable character likewise appear when the child stretches and bends its arms and legs, when it sucks, and when at a sudden noise it winks its eyes. Next come expressive movements pouting, smiling, wrinkling the forehead, and many others. Not until much later viz., in the second quarter of the first year begin the first attempts to imitate these movements, the attempts being preceded by imperfect efforts to respond inarticulately to friendly approaches ; THE ORIGIN OP THE WILL. . 51 L. . > last of all come movements that may be regarded as the result of independent deliberation. Where, now, in this long succession of manifold movements of the child, which are developed for the most part imperceptibly, is the inner, common thread that binds them all together? Scientific investiga- tion, ancient or modern, does not explain the con- nection and the variations of all the movements of the child ; these resemble very closely the movements of young animals. Yet light must penetrate the dark labyrinth if we only hold our attention firmly upon the direct cause of each separate movement. And small as are the results thus far, in a chemical, phys- ical, or psychological point of view, still it is certain that, physiologically considered, all the causes of the child's movements are either external, lying outside the body, or internal, arising within the body. All human movements arise either from external stimulus . or internal ; the stimuli are either hetero-kinetic or auto-kinetic. The remarkable and for the newborn child and 9 ' animal specially characteristic manifold, convulsive, > stretching movements, accompanied by spreading of the toes and lingers, commonly witnessed in the warm bath ; the frequently slow but sometimes rapid bend- ings of the limbs in a warm bed, and many of the numerous grimaces that at the beginning of the " child's life delight the relatives, but on the child's 52 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. part are utterly devoid of purpose these can have none but internal causes. Just such convulsive move- ments of the limbs are made by the marmot awaking from its winter sleep, and by the chicken developing in the egg that is being brooded, as may be observed under proper illumination. The human being before his entrance into the world is in the condition of the animal in its winter sleep birth awakes him. The movements made during the long repose of his brain, at unequal intervals, are impulsive, like the first move- ments of the limbs after birth ; and these it is out of which the later voluntary movements are formed, by slow degrees at first, and through a process continued for months, of separation, combination, adaptation, and co-ordination. But other building-stones yet are brought to the erection of the solid structure of the willed movements. For example, when strong impressions are made on the child through the senses, he makes inherited de- fensive movements, in which the brain has no part. If light too bright reaches his eye, the pupil at once contracts, as I have already said, and a closing of the lid takes place at a flash of light or at a loud report. If a substance of too bitter taste, like rhubarb, is put upon his tongue, he makes movements of retching ; and on being dipped into cold water, he draws deep breaths and utters cries. Other reflex movements might be enumerated, common to all children the THE ORIGIN OP THE WILL. 53 world over movements subject to well-known laws, und occurring with machine-like precision, the cause of which always lies outside the body. The reflex movement follows directly upon the external stimulus, and in a uniform manner. And not until the stimu- lus is too powerful are general convulsive movements added to these. Here we have a typical example of involuntary movement. The reflexes take place with- out the participation of the will, even in the adult human being, up to the end of life ; and when he wills them they are no longer reflexes. The best actor is not able to make voluntarily a reflex movement so quickly and accurately, to begin and end it with such almost infallible precision, as the child that as yet knows no dissimulation. A third kind of movements is likewise absolutely involuntary, but far more complicated than those men- tioned. It comprises the expressions of instinct. In- stinct is inherited memory. What one's ancestors for an inconceivable series of generations found especially useful and valuable for the preservation of themselves and those belonging to them, they preferred : so that among the defensive and other innate reflexes certain movements were more easily inherited than all others, simply because they occurred far more frequently. The instinctive movements are also distinguished iu many cases from all other childish movements by their complete co-ordination and their consecutive charac- 54 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. ter one might almost say, by their logic. The most instructive example of this is presented in the act of sucking, which is by no means purely reflexive, as it is frequently declared to be. It is a movement that is made only when the child is in a particular mood ; is not made when his appetite is satisfied, sometimes not if he is fretful, not if he is sick ; and it is the most useful movement that the child can possibly make. Choice, however, is not at all involved in it ; children born without a brain suck just as normal children do. I have myself seen this. Meantime, such instinctive movements are of the greatest importance for the fu- ture development of the will, because they lead early to the inhibition of reflexive movements. A child actively engaged in sucking at good milk does not ob- serve that he is touched, whereas he may previously have made violent defensive movements when touched in the same way. When a strong impulse presses to the front, weaker impulses can no longer possess the motor influence they otherwise have. This principle finds confirmation in the investiga- tion of a large group of childish movements the imitative; for, when a child begins to imitate what is done in his presence, he must have in his mind, be- fore he executes the movement of imitation, a more or less distinct image of that movement i. e., a motor idea. Accordingly, the cerebrum must take an active part, and must be free from other ideas. A brainless THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 55 child can not imitate anything ; neither can the newly born, because his cerebral cortex is not yet developed. Some deliberation, however short, must interpose : " IIow shall this movement be made ? " Therefore the attempt succeeds only when other motor ideas do not mingle themselves in, to cause disturbance. But in this case a certain degree of will is already attained ; a separation of ideas has taken place, and a combina- tion of the motor ideas that belong together, which is required for the excitation and contraction of just the muscles needed. Finally, there must be prior adapta- tion, with the first successful attempts at imitation, otherwise the act seen would remain, as in the first months, beyond the reach of imitation. Hence, in the conjunction and competition of all possible movements, impulsive, reflexive, instinctive, or other, the first suc- cessful imitative movement is a sign that at length an idea prevails as the product of deliberation. Will is here. The first movements imitated by the infant with manifest purpose are usually movements of ex- pression. From this very brief presentation of the most im- portant elements in the development of the will, it appears that will depends chiefly on ideas, and lienee on perceptions that are understood, and which on their part have been formed out of sensations. The impulsive movements and the reflexes come into ex- istence without antecedent ideas; so, likewise, the 56 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. original instinctive movements of the child ; but never the first imitations. It is plain, therefore, how extraor- dinarily important it is for the earliest education, to allow definite sensations, perceptions, and ideas to be experienced by the child, to permit him to practice definite imitations, and to keep away from him other ideas that are unsuitable, pernicious, destructive, first to the child himself and afterward to his kin. On the forming of the will depends well-nigh everything in the earliest education ; and if I have declared that the education of the human being begins in the first hour of his existence, it was in this sense I said it. Will is not at that time present, but we know that it is one day to be present, as surely as we know that every healthy newborn child will some day talk. But the will does not grow out of nothing. Consequently, we are. constrained, in the interest of the newborn human being, as well as in that of his kindred, to direct the will while it is in the germinal state into quite definite paths, and therefore to regulate the ex- ternal impressions. In this consists the principal problem of education in the nursery ; and precisel}; in this is the greatest failure made, because women with whom, in Germany, the child has almost ex- clusive intercourse in the first period of life do not themselves possess the requisite pedagogical experi- ence and knowledge. How in detail the innate re- flexive movements ; how the hereditary, but not in- THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 57 nate, instinctive movements, to which, e. g., walking belongs ; how the first imitations, together with the primitive, always innate, animal-like, impulsive, pur- poseless stretchings and bondings, work together in order that the voluntary movements 'may finally come to their right unfolding, can not yet be exactly told. But we have at least found the way that leads to it. What the important thing is in directing the germi- nating will of the child without breaking it, is easy to say but very hard to carry out. The young trees in the nursery must be bent, not snapped, when they are hindered by external influences from growing straight ; and no service is done the little child when from the beginning the natural unfolding of his will is made difficult by unnecessarily strict prohibitions and com- mands, the reason of which he is wholly incapable of comprehending. This is just the way to foster one of the most undesirable qualities of character, viz., obstinacy. When, on the contrary, in the very earliest period, the educator (or rather educatress, for men have little to do witli infants) forbids noth- ing without a sufficient reason and gives no needless commands, then there arise in the child more motor ideas that do not come into contradiction with the forbidden and with unpleasant commands. Thus the child's natural disposition comes out more purely in his movements, in acts and even little deeds of hero- ism. And that in the present ;ige of miseducation 58 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. it is in the highest degree desirable not to train so much, but instead to let the natural development perfect itself in a manner more in accordance with physiology, will hardly be denied. Physiological edu- cation, however, rests chiefly upon taking into con- sideration the physical substratum of all intellec- tual activity, the central nervous system. In order to be able to direct the will, one must control the motor ideas of the child. In order to lessen or abolish the tricks of training that hinder the natural development, we must watch not only the child but also the servants that have to do with him. Such thoroughgoing, absorbing attention to the child is, however, impossible even for the most loving mother who has other duties pressing upon her. She will therefore be obliged to limit herself to controlling the training of the child as far as possible. Everything that obstructs or harms the cerebral development e. g., too long playing in the twilight, violent rock- ing, carrying always on the same arm, wholly unsuit- able tight swathing, and many another thing impor- tant in the hygienic point of view she must forbid ; and at the same time she must wean herself from convenient but too far-going indulgence. Much, very much, here depends on repose and on self-con- trol, especially in her relation to the child, and on un- varying justice, mildness, and consistency, even while the child as vet understands nothing of it. An ex- THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 59 haustive exposition of these precepts is not in place here, but it is necessary to allude to them ; for every attempt to direct the childish will into the right ways remains fruitless unless the health of the brain re- mains unimpaired ; unless, therefore, it is previously cared for with the greatest attention. Think of the difficulty, which may mount up to impossibility, of training a sick child ! By the many attentions that are shown him on account of his illness, he is spoiled and mistrained ; and the longer these continue, so much the harder it proves to be, at a later period, to escape the consequences of the spoiling, because at that time his will is no longer so pliable. While the senses and the brain should be spared in their ac- tivity, we should not forget the need of the use and practice of both. It is only in the beginning that the will is easily directed ; the iron can be forged only so long as it is warm and soft. Pliable as the will of the child seems at the beginning, it very soon becomes hard enough to defy the blow of the hammer like the cold anvil. True, willing is nothing, ultimately, but an extremely peculiar reciprocal action of motor ideas, as I have tried to show : but it may alter existing move- ments, may isolate them one from another, combine them for an act, repeat, strengthen and weaken, hasten and retard them. All this every human being learns in his childhood to do, through a countless 60 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. number of unsuccessful experiments, without direc- tion, primarily because every human being comes into the world provided from the start with a certain ca- pacity of sensation, perception, and thought, which sets to work spontaneously together with the likewise inborn capacity of movement. Later, however, the development of this capacity is carried further only under the direction of the child's kindred. Then the child no longer learns through self-instruction, as he does predominantly, nay, almost exclusively, in all the first period, but he learns through influence exerted on him by the members of his family. Nevertheless, it is important to know that both ways of learning, hence both kinds of employment of the thinking capacity of the child, come to the same thing viz., that external sense-impressions arouse motor ideas which have as a consequence definite movements. These are the willed, the deliberate movements. Formerly, on the contrary, it was assumed, rather uncritically and quite generally, that the voluntary movements took place through a faculty of appetite or desire inborn in man, not capable of further analysis : the desire of the agreeable was the spring of all ac- tions, all voluntary movements. But with such an assumption one gets no further than before in knowl- edge of the origin of the will ; for the spring (or desire) is, after all, but a word that puts one riddle in place of THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 61 another. Desire presupposes the thing to be explained, the preferring, wishing, longing, the childish " I want it." I lay stress, therefore, on showing how little we are justified in continuing to regard desire as some- thing original. Physiologically, at least, the child iii the first part of his life behaves otherwise than as a being that desires. He has as yet no ideas. His rela- tives merely infer from the movements, the attitude, the position and situation of the child, certain mental states, as discomfort, displeasure, on account, it may be, of hunger. From their own subjective condition in like circumstances they infer, not without a mix- ture of imagination, the existence of a similar, or even the same, state in their child at the beginning of its life. As if the child knew in the least what hun- ger is, and had already a notion that its discomfort could be allayed by milk ! The hungry newborn babe by no means cries because it desires milk ; its crying is simply the expression of great discomfort. But why does it cry in discomfort ? The correct answer can only be, that thereby a certain lessening of its discomfort is effected. For if this discomfort were increased by crying, the child would be quiet, and the vigorous movement of the respiratory muscles in the loud screaming, that is often almost intoler- able even to the mother through its duration and strength, must be owing simply to a heightened excit- ability of the central organs of the nervous system. 62 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. If the function of nutrition is in a depressed condi- tion from a lack of food, then the central nervous motor apparatus is much more excitable than in the child satisfied with food ; it is more excitable in the child that is cold than in the one that is warm and comfortable ; more excitable in the wet child, because warmth is withdrawn from him too, than in the one who is made dry. Hence, what is wrongly taken for the expression of desire is nothing but the necessary consequence of heightened excitability of the nerv- ous system ; and this excitability, as we see confirmed a hundredfold in the most different sorts of animals, increases and diminishes at the beginning of life chiefly in proportion to the absence or the supply of food and of fresh air, warmth and coolness ; in brief, according to the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of the most important external conditions of exist- ence. Thus the child behaves as if it desired, and yet it does not desire. But the repeated alternation of much movement in discomfort*' and less movement after alleviation of the discomfort, especially during the first days, leaves behind traces in the central nerv- ous substance, which make possible and promote the association of the recollection of movement with the external impression that removes the discomfort ; hence, in particular, the connection between luke- warm, sweet, white wetness (milk) with removal of discomfort. Another such impression is the cleans- THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 63 ing, warm, not-white, not-sweet wetness (bath) ; so, too, the smooth, soft, warm, white skin of the mother. In this way, through the gathering of primitive expe- riences, thinking is by degrees aroused ; and through repetition of the agreeable and the disagreeable, these are gradually distinguished as sources of the feelings of pleasure and discomfort. Progress in the accuracy of this discrimination means practice. Mere lack of the agreeable is often, to the child, in a high degree dis- agreeable, causing discomfort, so that he soon reaches the point, by means of continual discrimination of light and dark, loud and low, warm and cold, dry and wet, etc., of avoiding as far as possible everything that excites in him unpleasant feelings, and even that which does not cause him pleasant feelings. This he effects by means of turning away, throwing away, and many other defensive movements formed out of the inborn defensive reflexes through the intervention of ideas. On the other hand, he adjusts himself to that which excites pleasure in him. While he is developing the hereditary instinctive movement of seizing, he grasps much, turns his head and his gaze toward that which excites pleasure, and begins to move in the correspond- ing direction. Then we say the child is seeking. But in this the effective agency is nothing mystical, is no immanent transcendent desire, no impulse in the sense of the earlier philosophers ; physiologically speaking, it is in the last analysis the excitability of the pro- 64 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. toplasm in the nervous system. That is the living thing in the adult, as in the egg and in the child which stands between the two. That is what is capa- ble of excitability, and which leads as well to the im- perfect movements of the child as to the more perfect ideas, later on, of the adult who wills. It would take us too far to consider more in detail here upon this basis the process of willing, which is fundamentally connected with deliberation. But to the completion of this sketch of the devel- opment of will in the child belongs at least the men- tion of his first attempts to control himself. Only through inhibitions of movements, a positive willing- not, not the mere omission of willing, does this great advance in the intellectual development show itself. So long as the child can not discern the very great value to himself of cleanliness within the first three fourths of the first year in general, but in any case within the first half year we can hardly speak of the beginning of inhibition of a reflex movement. But after unpleasant consequences of letting-himself- go have gradually been experienced, and the idea of the connection of this with his own conduct has been often repeated, there comes to him naturally the con- sideration that the stopping of certain movements and excretions, that quiet and obedience, are wont to be associated with more pleasant consequences than the opposite conduct which has hitherto prevailed THE ORIGIN OF THE WILL. 05 alone. Hence arise the first efforts to inhibit volun- \' tarily some reflexes and instinctive movements; and herewith the germ of self-control is planted. For it is preposterous to suppose that movements such as cry- ing in the night would be interrupted, or would not take place, simply on account of the lack of the requi- site impulse on account of there being no idea present to occasion the crying. No, the idea is present, but is silenced, overpowered, made ineffective, and such an inhibition is by all means of great consequence. Here, then, we have a considerable development of the will of the child, and one that is of the greatest pedagogical importance. Yet the educator must be on his guard against straining the bow too tight and too often ; otherwise the discomfort connected with every act of self-control will gain the preponderance over the results of insight into the advantage of that control. In itself the repose attained by voluntary inhibition is unchildlike, and a child that invariably controlled himself would cease to be a child. CHAPTER V. THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. FOR a long time and widely the error prevailed, that for the child's first learning there was absolute necessity of a teacher : as if only complete thoughts, ideas proceeding from, the perceptions of adults and imparted by means of language at first spoken, later by written or printed words could be impressed upon the childish brain, and that only by this means, there- fore, the mind would finally be developed in the right manner. Herein lies a gross fallacy, although one that often escapes notice. Because the highest culture can not be attained without thorough instruction in language, the inference was drawn that this culture is attained exclusively through instruction in language. Our schools are still suffering from this error. In the first period after birth the dawn, as it were, of the intellectual life instruction in language is of no ac- count, because sense-perception is the means by which the child learns. His own seeing and feeling, his own experience e. g., of pain when he hits himself, burns THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 67 himself, or falls down these are the natural teachers of the little child. Not even the best pictorial illus- trations of the things surrounding the child have any- thing like the educational value of one single object seen or felt by himself. One who sees the world through colored glasses gets a false notion of it. Yel- low glasses lend to a landscape in winter a warm tone; blue ones in the midday heat of summer give a cold light, like that of the moon. Children who must make their acquaintance with the world through gay picture-books, indestructible or other, or through the varying, subjectively colored speech of adults, can not get the right notion of it. .- They will see it, on the one hand, in a bright light ; on the other, in a dull. In culture, the great thing is a distinct view of the world based on one's own sense-perception. Without this we have no genuine picture of the world, but merely the picture of a picture, an incorrect copy. This truth which ought to be the criterion for the right training of children at home, as well as for the regulation of our whole school system, from the elementary up to the high school becomes most plain when we inquire how it is that the human being comes to learn what no language, no picture, and no book, no influence whatever of another human being, can impart to him unless he has knowledge of it in ad- vance. The discrimination of colors, the discrimination of 68 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. tones, of cold aiid heat, of various tastes and smells in fact, even the discrimination of light and da n , and that of left and right all this no child car learn through words. This is a field in which I ha ? been at work with special predilection for years, in the ob- servation of little children ; but it is too large to be traversed here in all directions. I limit myself to a few examples. How shall we teach a child the difference between red and green ? All we can do is merely to make the difference plain when the child already feels it ; words are nothing to the purpose, they have to do simply with the naming ; and they sound differently in different languages, having no relation to the color- sensations as such. Just as little as we could succeed in making a normal child regard red and green as the same, or the fifth as not different from the octave, just so little can we succeed in imparting to him, if he is color-blind, the differences of these impressions by in- struction through words. No man can communicate to another what color is, or describe to him a tone. And it is the same with all genuine sensations. One must himself have them, experience them, in order to know what they are. And this original self-experi- ence is in general for all instruction, for the whole of the earliest education, far more important than the experiencing over again of that which others have already found out in themselves, and which they now at second-hand impress, cram, not to say pour in THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 69 through a funnel. Here applies in full force the say- ing, " If you don't feel it, you won't get it by running after it." The extraordinary incitement which the direct ob- servation of nature, and particularly of animate nature, gives during the whole season of childhood nothing else can supply or make good. A murmuring spring, a leaf, an ear of corn, a tiny beetle, a creeping snail, nay, even a single hair, becomes to the child, in the critical period of the development of his mind, a foun- tain of pleasure that absorbs him wholly. In dealing with the most insignificant things in play (cf. Chapter III), which is the most influential school for the cul- tivation of reason and of character, the mind gets its most abundant material for further development. Thinking, in the proper sense of the word, can not be taught to any one by instruction through words. No child is instructed in it, but every one learns of himself to think, as well as to see and hear. We can do almost nothing toward it at the beginning, except to remove the obstacles that check it ; and we must not hasten it. "We can not prevent a normal child from thinking. But the finer development of the faculty of thought i. e., of the inherited capacity for combining ideas that arise separately, and for separat- ing combined ideas from one another this is possible only through instruction, instruction in observation and in language, not in language alone. At any rate, 70 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. as appears from the biographies and the achievements of men who have received one-sided instruction, not sufficiently calling into exercise their own powers of observation, thinking is defective, judgment warped, and knowledge of one's relations to the world arrest- ed, unless one is from childhood familiar with realities through his own experience. But on this side, too, there is danger of having too much of a good thing. A one-sidedness in the direction of mere observation, caused by devotion to the business in hand, by exclu- sive occupation with reality of one kind only, does not permit a symmetrical development to take place ; and the difficulty in making up later what was neg- lected in youth is, that the plasticity is lost. The young hand easily learns every new trade, the old hand no longer any. If in a large manufactory one workman does, for years, nothing but cut paper, another nothing but fold it, 'a third merely packs it, these men can not easily exchange their parts on a sudden without damage to the establishment, nor can they be as well employed for any other kind of work offhand. The great evils of a one-sided instruction, which is based perhaps preponderatingly or exclusively upon writing and reading, together with the memorizing that goes with it the study of letters, in fact may already be made intelligible in some degree from the physiological point of view. On account of the peda- THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. fl gogical importance of the after consequences, I will briefly show how. Although during the last decade a considerable number of skillful experimenters, each of whom thinks he alone has found the truth of the matter, have been contending over the assignment of the various func- tions of the brain to the separate portions of the brain ; and although, without doubt, the controversy as to details will last a long time yet, still the fact can no longer be doubted that quite definite tracts of the cerebral surface are associated with quite definite sense-areas and kinds of movements. To mention a single one, the physiologist, Hermann Munk, has suc- ceeded, after victorious refutation of many attacks, in demonstrating that the already mentioned portion of the occipital lobe designated as the visual sphere (p. 9) is the only place in which visual impressions are elabo- rated into visual ideas; and, further, it can not, when fully developed, perform any other functions than those belonging to the act of vision. If this spot is stimulated, then movements of the eyes take place. In like manner can no longer be doubted the existence of a cerebral center that has been much longer known, the speech center discovered by the distinguished Parisian physician and investigator, Broca. These are merely examples. Whether, us upon the map separate countries are sharply defined from one another, so likewise separate districts of the cerebral cortex abut 72 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. directly upon one another, or whether they overlap one another, like areas of touch on the surface of the skin, or at least are not to be discriminated with ac- curacy from one another, it is at any rate certain that the development of the cerebral centers thai is, of areas of the cerebral cortex associated with specific intellectual activities is connected with exercise or practice, with the frequent repetition of the same kinds of movements and of sense-impressions. One who never learns to speak has no speech cen- ter. No animal has such a center, because no animal is capable of exercising himself sufficiently in the co- ordinated use of his tongue and his laryngeal nerves and muscles, with simultaneous employment of his voice as expression of his ideas. And even the micro- cephalous human child, whose skull has become os- sified prematurely so that the brain found no room for further growth the cretin, the idiot, capable of life indeed, bat incapable of speech these all are in the same condition. The vocal nerves and muscles, the tongue and the larynx, are developed ; sensations, perceptions, and ideas are not lacking, although they remain upon a lower level ; but the ability to express these by means of the vocal apparatus and articula- tion, this it is that is wanting to them, even when their hearing is perfect. They can not build the bridge from hearing to speaking, because their brain declines to serve. The brain is developed only through activ- THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 73 ity, and only through that are the functions localized and associated in it. It is from the beginning fitted out in the most luxurious manner with capacities for learning everything possible ; but not all brains just alike, because heredity plays an essential part here. A child may not possess a single one of the many supe- rior talents of his father and mother, but may have in- herited instead a very different talent from his grand- parents or great-grandparents. Hundreds of various proficiencies, which human beings acquire with great- er or less facility, particularly in youth, necessitate, each for itself, the development of a special center in the brain, the injury or destruction of which will en- tail the abolishment of the possibility of retaining that proficiency, and hence of continuing the cerebral activity corresponding to it. Strange as it may sound, it is nevertheless true that this holds good not only for arts laboriously acquired, perfected in a long course of years by the man of cultivation, such as playing on the pianoforte, writing, drawing, painting, but also for much less esteemed handicrafts, sewing, knitting, crocheting, lace-making, planing, sawing, carving, milking, etc. What need of multiplying instances? It is enough simply to point to the comparative physiology of the brain and the pathological anatomy of the human brain, as well as the experimental physiology of the brain of two very intelligent animals, viz., the dog 74 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. and the monkey, in order to make evident that ac- cording to the occupation, according to the predomi- nating activity of an animal or of a human child, its brain must allow more room now for this, now for that function. A creature born blind has no visual sphere and does not acquire any ; one born deaf, no auditory sphere. These proportionally large areas of the brain go to waste, or else remain free in part for different uses. It is known that the blind have more sensibility of touch than the seeing, and that the deaf very often see better than do those that hear. The auditory sphere borders on the visual. The mammals almost without exception have, as I stated (p. 19), a much larger olfactory lobe than man has, because they occupy themselves more with smelling than he does, and this characteristic is transmitted to their posterity in increased degree. The latest experiments of sur- geons and anatomists have demonstrated that in cer- tain disturbances of vision certain lesions of the visual area in the brain exist, just as in case of certain dis- turbances of movements of the limbs are found certain alterations in certain portions of the central nervous system, which may be the result of arrested nutrition, of poisoning, injury, or inflammation. All these new experiences are, in my opinion, emi- nently significant in regard to the training and in- struction of our children ; for it is clear that, if influ- ence is exerted in a definite and always in the same THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 75 direction upon the exceedingly impressionable, plastic brain of the child, the brain must from the start be developed in a one-sided manner for the entire life, and that the finest characteristic a man can possibly have viz., harmonious culture can not be attained. By harmonious activity of mind I understand an activity in which the intellectual and the emotional are in equipoise ; the emotions do not disturb the working of the intellect, neither does a stark intellec- tualism (such as at this day unfortunately too often appears precisely in the most cultivated classes) pre- vent feeling from having its due. Harmonious cul- ture, however, implies that the senses, and therefore the observing powers, shall be exercised, and that the body, including the whole external personality, shall not be neglected as compared with the mind. This must be taken into account even in the case of the smallest child, by regulating the external impressions that act upon him ; and this involves selection of what he is to learn. The recognition of the extraordinary power com- mitted to the family of the little child a power that is later transferred to the child himself, in the ability to choose what is to be learned must necessarily heighten the feeling of responsibility in the members of the family. It is a pressing duty in these days to have regard to physiology in selecting what is to be learned, as well as in determining the wav in which it 76 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. . is to be learned. If we do not heed this, if we forget that neither one-sided concentration upon reading and writing, which means overfilling of the brain with im- ages of letters or figures, nor occupation with anything and everything, continually changing, which means dissipation, is serviceable for the intellectual germs in the growing brain of the child, then we ought not to be surprised at the evil consequences that show them- selves in the shape of arrested mental growth both at home and in the school. Physicians, especially the superintendents of clinical hospitals and alienists, have frequent opportunity to observe those diseases that are caused by too long and persistent tension of a single part of the nervous system, and the consequent excess- ive one-sidedness. Many of these diseases are up to the present time incurable. But teachers, who have opportunity only in exceptional cases to observe their pupils in later life after these have left school, do not note in the individual case what wrong they have done. Those consequences that make medical treat- ment necessary are classed in part under the head of " trade or occupation-neuroses." There is a whole catalogue of convulsions and paralytic affections which are occasioned, like writer's cramp, sewing cramp, telegrapher's cramp, exclusively by the prac- tice, carried too far, of one and the same form of activity with which the brain has from the begin- ning been drawn into sympathy ; and extraordinary THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 77 patience, great acuteness, and much skill are required in order to alleviate these stubborn ailments. But before it gets so far as this, there are disturbances that do not appear on the surface and are not thought remarkable until great numbers of persons are seized at the same time as by an epidemic nervousness, and their intellectual activity is turned away from the nat- ural, from the things that concern us in health, and is occupied with illusions. So it is with children who arc too early forced to become book-learned. But it would carry us too far to set forth here the bearing of the child's mental development upon reform in meth- ods of instruction, which is coming to be regarded more seriously since I have shown it to be necessary from a biological standpoint. What I have just said is enough to show how much the mother should think about the care of the nervous system of her darling, in the very first period of the child's learning. More consideration is commonly shown for the stomach than for the brain. The brain, I repeat, should neither be developed predominantly in one direction through preference of a single occupation or through exclusive use of one organ of sense, which produces one-sided- ness; nor through the supply of intellectual pabulum from all possible quarters, which causes dilettantcism. The great thing is rather, as lias long since been ex- pressed very briefly ;md forcibly, " letting the child alone." At the beginning of life the organic basis 78 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. of mental activity is capable of everything good and everything bad, but concealed as yet, like the flower in the bud. True, the newborn child is, as I have already re- marked (p. 7), capable of a sensation of light, but is not yet able to see. He is " mind-blind." Further, he is prepared to hear soon all kinds of sounds, to smell, to taste, to feel ; but he is still mind-deaf, men- tally insensible i. e., he has a sensation of light, of sound, of warmth, and of impressions upon his skin and his organs of sense in general, but has as yet no understanding of it all, because his cerebral hemi- spheres are not yet developed. Our language, unfor- tunately, lacks names for these conditions of central anosmia (smell-blindness i. e., inability to interpret sensations of smell, a condition in which many adults continue through life) ; central ageusia (taste-blind- ness) ; central ancesthesia (touch-blindness i. e., in- ability to interpret impressions of touch) ; central akinesia (movement-blindness). Yet all children must experience these states of physiological defect as neces- sary phases of development. Their organs of sense they have, and those organs are in good condition and receive the most manifold impressions from without ; the nerves are stimulated, but the proper parts of the cerebral cortex are not yet capable of performing their functions. We must therefore let the child alone while he is learning to see and hear, and for a con- THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. ?9 siderable time after. The disadvantage arising from a later beginning of methodical instruction is in any case far less than the harm done by over-excitement through beginning too early. The earlier the imperfectly developed central nerv- ous system is subjected to a strain in a one-sided manner, or even in a manifold activity, so much the earlier does it become dulled and so much the less plasticity it retains for later use. But the longer it retains its receptivity, so much the longer does youth last. He who is interested in much, has in advance a great advantage over the indifferent person, and re- mains young even in age; whereas the indifferent becomes old in the season of youth. What we call intellectual freshness is essentially the extremely valu- able faculty of taking an interest in many things and yet of applying one's self at will persistently, and with concentrated attention to a single subject. The little child can not do either of these things. He is at first interested in little else than his milk, and during his first year can not direct his attention long to one and the same thing without fatigue. But he learns both these things, without the instruction of grown people, in play, and in play his impressionability perceptibly increases. Hence it is advisable not to shorten un- necessarily the first learning-time of the child, in which he learns most through self-instruction, through his own experiences in what we call childish play. 80 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. The child's learning to think consists chiefly in this : the tinder standing of the simple elements among the innumerable sense-impressions, which are the stimuli of his sensory nerves, and which follow one another in irregular alternation, now strong, now weak. Much time is needed for this process ; for understanding begins with the operation of the lowest intellectual function, discrimination, which belongs to all animals, and even, in a certain fashion, to the living cell-contents of plants. Every living thing possesses a faculty of discrimination. The living protoplasm in the green plant, for example, discriminates between light and darkness, and behaves very differently by day and by night. The smallest living microbes distin- guish acutely between the character of the habitat suitable for fostering them and the unsuitable ; and they increase in the former lodging rapidly, producing often wasting diseases, while in the latter they multi- ply slightly or not at all. Animals distinguish, by means of the living pro- toplasm of their sensory cells, the sensations occa- sioned by impressions upon their skin, their eyes, their organs of sense in general. So does the human child. But he goes much farther, for he distinguishes too, much more acutely than the animal, the ideas arising from the sensations, feelings, perceptions, by means of the living protoplasm of his brain. AVhat seemed at the beginning the same, or very like, is gradually THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 81 separated into not the same and not like. And from this it appears that it is much easier to discover the likenesses of different impressions than the differences of like impressions. How often occurs, even with the adult, the confounding of two physiognomies ! Here the resemblances of the two strike the eye at once, whereas longer observation is required to satisfy us in regard to the unlikeness, or at any rate to express that in words. The child is much better organized for the apprehension of small agreements than for the appre- hension of small variations. lie takes the wine-bottle for his milk-bottle, the whitish Goulard water in it for his milk ; and he amuses his mother by confounding a hundred small objects, or sounds, that resemble one another, while he is practicing himself in discrimina- tion. It is because pleasure arises from many impercep- tible agreements a consonance ; whereas displeasure is caused by lack of agreement dissonance as was remarked in the year 1712 by the great Leibnitz in re- gard to music ; it is for this reason that the agree- ment found by one's self is preferred, while the disturb- ance of the agreement in details, that is sought out or forced upon us, is less regarded. In the course of countless generations this unequal valuation of the im- pressions lias become established through inheritance, so that now the child in his learning to think, in his discrimination of ideas, much prefers to put together 82 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. and keep together similar qualities rather than dis- similar ; the latter do not give so much satisfaction, or at any rate not so much delight. In this matter the primitive activity of the under- standing, comparison, finds the most extended em- ployment. It forms the basis of all later processes of thought. We may find at once instruction and entertainment in observing the manner in which little children com- pare together two objects recognized as different, plac- ing them side by side, over and under each other; how the difference is made larger or smaller, and one or the other is pulled and twisted and turned upside down. But the manifold significance of simple desig- nations of space, as, for example, of the words " Round the other way," in regard to a ninepin, perhaps, that is to be laid in a box, is not to be expressed by words. AVhen the child ignorant of words turns the ninepin, reverses it, turns it to the left, to the right, inclines it with the head of it down, then up, and then lays it crosswise, he is comparing it. He is thinlcing and learning ; and by such trying and testing he is gradu- ally prepared to compare in like manner more com- plicated objects ; but not yet events, and not abstract, higher ideas derived from objects and events i. e., concepts. For this there is need of language. As a whole, the first development of thinking and learning in the child may be compared to the first de- THE CHILD'S FIRST LEARNING. 83 velopment of the forms of the animal coming to being in the egg. The first thing that happens is the sep- aration of the homogeneous, or at least undistinguish- able, formative cells into heterogeneous, the differences of which become greater and greater in the progress of the development. If the differentiation progresses properly, without disturbance, every group has then a certain size in proportion to the whole, a certain con- dition and function, and a faultless being is born. But if this harmonious development is disturbed, then it may easily happen that one group of formative cells grows faster than the others, and at their expense. In consequence of this, some parts are arrested in their development during their differentiation, and some one part gets an exaggerated, monstrous development. The final outcome is, under the circumstances, an ugly abortion incapable of life. The application of this description to the child's learning follows of itself from what has gone before. CHAPTER VI. INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE WITHOUT INTELLECT. IF the capacity of thought is inborn in every hu- man being and there can no longer be a doubt about it the consequence does not follow that the human being can reach a high grade of development without language. Even at this day many persons suppose that without articulate speech, and therefore without words, there is no understanding, no thinking, no memory even. I have, however, proved that careful observation of little children alone, particularly of those born deaf and who do not learn ordinary lan- guage, furnishes complete proof of the incorrectness of this tradition of the schools. In fact, we do not need first to point to the understanding of animals, to the abundant and excellent observations made by friends of animals in the fields and the woods, in zoo- logical gardens and aquariums observations some- what more taken into account of late years by scien- tific investigators ; we need only to go diligently to INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 85 work in the nurseries of our own homes, in order to collect facts for the demonstration. When, for example, the child as yet absolutely without speech strikes, with a spoon in his right hand, the plate, the newspaper, the table, takes notice of the sound, and thereupon, taking the spoon in his left hand, repeats the same acoustic experiments, there is in this a sign of intellect which seeks for causes. The cause of the sound is not in the right hand, as the right hand is not the only .one that produces the sound ; and, what surprises the child most when he strikes on the plate, not only can the right hand, pressed firmly on it, dull the sound made by striking with the left hand, but likewise the left hand can dull the sound when the striking is done with the right. Thus an infant deliberates when he has no knowledge or use of words. If the child has learned to walk, but not yet to talk, he surprises us by his notions. He wants to take down a biscuit from the cupboard that is too high for him; he tries in vain, and then, without any suggestion from others, he goes and gets a cricket, and with unspeakable effort brings it to the right place. Now he can conveniently lay hold of the thing desired. All this involves an extended process of de- liberation, the application of experience?, and without language. The child's reasoning, even when erroneous, is, in the utter lack of language, a proof of the devel- opment of the intellect for itself. For example, when 86 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. the child that has no language has shut a door so that the lock catches, and every adult person must regard the door as closed fast, the child often tries it a long time with his fingers, and presses against it with his body ; he is testing whether the door is really shut ; he doubts about it because he does not understand the effect of the bolt. If the watering-pot has become empty, the child keeps on, none the less, watering the flowers with it, probably in the belief that the water- ing-pot must, when in the right position, continue to supply water, inasmuch as he has seen water come out to the last when adults were watering plants. Even the continuance of the sucking at an empty nursing- bottle, which was perhaps not sufficiently filled, is an act of intellect ; for continued sucking at the breast did bring more milk into the mouth, and hence the erroneous inference in spite of the fact that the bottle can be seen to be empty. Another sign of intellect is the holding up of an earring to the mother's ear by an infant wholly destitute of language. As soon as he begins to combine such earlier observations of a complex nature with present ones, thought-activity is already well advanced. It affords a special intellectual pleasure to discover such facts in the second half year of a child's life. Any one who observes attentively and patiently, and who practices himself in interpreting the expression of the childish countenance, must acquire the conviction INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 87 that every human being, long before he learns his mother-tongue nay, before he understands the mean- ing of words at any rate entirely independently of any possible premature understanding of words shows intelligent actions, is capable of deliberation, and a fact on which especial stress is to be laid ho surpasses, precisely in this direction, the most highly endowed vertebrate animals ; for it must not be for- gotten that in those creatures the most surprising ex- hibitions of their intellectual activity are brought about by training at the hands of man : e. g., count- ing up to five, by the great ape which Romanes trained and caused to be trained, witli straws ; and the performances of bird-dogs in seeking and fetching. The Indian elephants, the Arabian horses, the St. Bernard dogs, and tame monkeys, when they have attained the highest degree of development of brute intellect, understand more of human language, of the commands of their masters, than the human child understands (although he surpasses those animals in sagacity) of the word* that his mother says to him. The child, while ignorant of language, has already more intellect than the most sagacious animal at the highest point of its intellectual development, because he learns faster than any animal whatever. But the objection might be urged that the child has merely learned, after all, to act intelligently on account of his intercourse with intelligent human 88 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. beings that use language, and in fact exclusively on account of his hearing spoken language which has, unconsciously on his part, been appropriated and utilized by him, so that in reality it is language alone that has brought to development the intellect of the child not yet able to speak. It is therefore important to observe also those children in whom every possi- bility of this sort is lacking. Children born com- pletely deaf are unfortunately not very rare ; and although the so-called deaf and dumb, who, as we know, are not dumb, but only word-dumb, and do utter inarticulate sounds, can later, by means of toil- some instruction, be advanced to talking with the fingers, and partially to articulate speech by means of the touch-sense of the tongue and the reading of the lips, still there are many who grow up without instruc- tion in verbal language. These children have, how- ever, through the senses of sight and touch, a large number of ideas, and they often have a remarkable understanding. They can make themselves under- stood when with their fellows by looks, gestures, and all sorts of signs that are quite unintelligible to adults. They have at their disposal an elaborately developed mimic art that is extraordinary. They are pantomim- ists. And the height of culture such a deaf-mute can reach proves at least that the existence of the intellect is not bound up with the hearing or learning of articu- late speech. Actual proofs, as well as simple inferences INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 89 from unquestionable experiences of teachers of deaf- mutes, demonstrate that quite generally the formation of simple ideas and the combination of them into new ideas, and also the separation of individual ideas from a complication of them in a word, thought is not dependent upon the learning of words. Eather is it the case, as I have shown in the book that has been mentioned, that ideas are the necessary previous con- dition for the understanding of the first words learned, and therefore for learning to talk. If these ideas are wanting, the development of language is not attained ; there is only a certain, very slight, development of the intellect, which does not go beyond that of the brute. This higher animal intelligence is shown by those human beings, degraded or grown wild, whom we call "brute-men," who happily arc but rarely found in civilized countries. The farther civilization spreads, the more seldom will it be possible for little children, separated through accident or malicious intent from human society, to grow up in the wilderness partly with beasts, so that years may pass before they are captured. The few accounts of such cases have a pe- culiar value because no experiment can supply the place of them. Unfortunately, the narratives extant are very untrustworthy and defective; they come mostly from the earlier centuries, and have not been under the censorship of trained physiologists and 90 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. psychologists. Still, whatever the deduction to be made for arbitrary additions from the imagination of the chroniclers, this much remains : that children growing up in the wilderness do not in all cases lose the capacity for culture, and are not by any means completely imbruted. Several cases may be found described in the trea- tise of Prof. A. Eauber (the value of which is not suf- ficiently appreciated), published in 1885, entitled " Homo Sapiens Ferus, or the Condition of the Hu- man Being Become Wild and its Significance for Sci- ence, the State, and the School." In general, the ac- counts are to the effect that of wild beasts or beasts of the chase, with which the isolated children are said to have grown up, only bears and wolves are named ; of domestic animals that graze on the mountains, only sheep and pecora (possibly goats). The countries in which within the last five centuries such brute-chil- dren, forest-children, mountain-children, or whatever they may be called, have been captured, are Ireland, Belgium, Holland (on the Rhenish-Prussian border), Lithuania, Siebenbiirgen (on the AYallachian border), Hungary, France (Champagne, Aveyron, the Pyre- nees), and Germany (Hesse, Bavaria, Hanover). Con- sidering the geographical dissimilarity of the distribu- tion, together with the striking similarity in accounts that come, independent of one another, out of the most varied times concerning the behavior of the INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 91 foundlings, the most stubborn doubter must admit that we are not dealing here with mere legends. The accounts really deserve a very thorough exam- ination. Every one of them is instructive, and shows how little applicable to the uneducated, isolated hu- man being are the words of Schiller : " The dignity of man ! no more of that, I pray you. Give him food and a place to dwell in ; when you have covered his nakedness, the dignity will come of itself." For the question before us several details arc im- portant, because they show that an imbrutement caused by the separation of children from human so- ciety does not, after all, invariably suppress the ca- pacity of intellectual development ; and that those imbruted children that learned to talk had a whole circle of ideas, and turned to practical account the experiences they had in the wilderness. The Hessian boy, unable to speak, who was cap- tured about the middle of the fourteenth century, ran on all-fours, but learned to walk erect and to talk. The Bamberg boy without speech (at the close of the sixteenth century) showed an "astonishing sup- pleness and nhnbleness in jumping and running, espe- cially on all-fours," but among human beings he grad- ually took on " an orderly behavior," and married ; lie must, therefore, have learned also to walk upright and to talk. The Irish youth (in the seventeenth century) with- 92 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. out speech " bleated like a sheep," and did not put off his brutish ways (sylvestre ingenium) except through constraint and after living a long time among human beings. The Lithuanian boy (likewise in the seventeenth century) had a voice like a bear's, but learned, accord- ing to one account, to speak ; according to another, not ; and learned to walk erect. The famous Peter von Hameln, who was dis- covered in 1724, walked erect, but, as it appears, learned to talk but little, as was the case with the boy of Aveyron. On the other hand, the girl of Songi (1731) ac- quired speech perfectly, although at first she acted like a beast of prey. As to other human " wildings," it is not reported that they did not learn to speak at all, but neither is it reported that they did learn to speak ; the accounts are too scanty. The outcome of the facts in our possession is, that the development of the brain is very considerably re- tarded in case of a separation of many years 1 duration of a child from other human beings, in spite of a pro- digious development of sense-acuteness and muscular strength, but that the capability of development is not lost. Still, the difficulty of humanizing the imbruted child is far greater than that of developing the original INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 93 child, because in the former too much has to be un- learned which in the latter exists only potentially, and is checked in advance in its development ; and also because the finer development of the cerebral cortex, indispensable to the higher intellectual activity, has been kept back in consequence of the lack of impres- sions, particularly of human actions worthy of imita- tion. The cerebral hemispheres would inevitably lose in plasticity as years went on. But these imbruted children, although they do not talk some of them even do not laugh and do not learn to walk upright, can yet seek their food with great skill, and with a slyness, suppleness, dexterity, and endurance nowhere else observed in human be- ings ; and they attain later, with careful treatment and, what is more to the point here, through gradual instruction, a degree though, to be sure, a very low degree of culture. This would not be possible if they had not human intellect: otherwise, animals without understanding would in like manner be capable of being civilized ; but all attempts in this direction have failed. On the other hand, these same imbruted children furnish the proof of the indispensableness of the learn- ing of language for the attainment of full intellectual activity and the development of feeling by means of learning to speak in the first years of life ; for they have almost all lost the ability to frame thoughts that 94: DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. go beyond the immediate surroundings, and to rise to higher concepts to the highest reason. That this ca- pacity which first lends to human life its true worth, is possible only through the learning of language and, in fact, of verbal language, not picture-language or sign-language, or any other means of understanding nobody denies. Nevertheless, we must not there- fore suppose that with the complete possession of ver- bal language is given at the same time a perfect reason also. There are superior instruments that are played in a masterly manner by musicians unsurpassed in the technique of their profession, yet these musicians do not all have what we call " soul " in music. So there are eminent speakers and learned men who are mas- ters of several, perhaps a dozen, different languages, but who may not have anywhere near so much in- tellect as some silent thinker who knows only his mother-tongue, and yet sets a world astir through his combinations. In the child, too, no special activity of intellect is proved by the quick learning of speech, the extended knowledge of words, and the ready use of words learned. On the contrary, excessive speaking argues less intelligence, because, of course, less time remains for thinking. There are cases of mental derangement and anomalies, in which men and women put together meaningless words, just as the child does at a certain epoch of its development, in contiimally repeated sue- INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 95 cession, intolerable at last to the hearers, sometimes uttering them with monotonous voice, sometimes with varying tones, screaming, singing, babbling. Here we have language without intellect ; the talking engine lacks an engineer, the driver of the wagon has dropped the reins, the horses have run away and are leaping without control. In the idiot, on the other hand, language is lacking on account of defective de- velopment of his brain from the beginning. The ideas necessary for the learning of verbal language can not be formed at all ; hence he remains at the stage of an irrational animal. 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