GIFT OF 
 cv 
 
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 EDITED BY 
 
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 VOLUME XXIV. 
 
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INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES 
 
 MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 
 IN THE CHILD 
 
 BY 
 
 W. PREYER 
 
 PEOFESSOB OF PHYSIOLOGY IN JENA 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE MIND OF THE CHILD (PART I. THE^ SENSES AND THE WILL; 
 PART II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF' THE INTELLECT) 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 
 
 BY H. W. BROWN 
 
 TEACHER IN THE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL AT WORCESTER, MASS. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 1899 
 
4- - 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1893, 
 BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
 ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED 
 AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U. S. A. 
 
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. Preyer, 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 psych ogenesis. Accord- 
 ingly he 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 
 
 258267 
 
v i 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. Holden, 
 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 PAquisition du Langage." Mr. E. H. 
 Eussell, 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. Recently, 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. v ii 
 
 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, 
 
viii 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. 
 
 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. 
 
AUTHOK'S PKEFACE. 
 
 MOKE 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 Seele 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, are 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 
 2 
 
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. He 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 unveiled 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, 
 
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 at 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- 
 fested in the first few days by discrimination between agree- 
 able and disagreeable odors (p. 3). The cutaneous sense, which 
 includes the sense of temperature along with that of 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, 6). 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. 9). The brain of the infant differs in form 
 from that of the adult. Ganglionic cells are 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 
 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 
 these 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- 
 bility and after-effect (p. 26). The sanguine child to be treated 
 differently from the phlegmatic (p. 27). The choleric requires 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. X xi 
 
 specially judicious regimen (p. 28). Children injured by want 
 of proper care, and by being waked from sleep (p. 29). 
 
 CHAPTER lit. 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. He 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 denned 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 play (p. 43). The child discovers and invents (p. 
 
xx ii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 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. 56). 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. 60). The 
 crying of a hungry babe is not caused by desire of food but by 
 physical discomfort. Why he cries from discomfort (pp. 61, 
 62). 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. 65). 
 
 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. 66). 
 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. xxiii 
 
 be taught by words, although the highest development of it is 
 attained by instruction through language (p. 69). 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 " 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 are thinking (p. 82). De- 
 velopment of thinking like that of the animal in the egg (p. 83). 
 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, 86). 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. 88). Ideas must pre- 
 cede language; without them development is slight, as in chil- 
 dren growing up in solitude (p. 89). Forest-children (pp. 90- 
 92). 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. 94). Learn- 
 ing of language requires : first, a plastic brain ; second, influ- 
 ence of human beings (p. 95). The ideas that must precede lan- 
 guage are gained mostly by observation of looks and gestures 
 (p. 96). Child watches movements of persons (p. 97). Winking 
 
xxiv 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, ha) 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 G-6'ring'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 at 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 and a 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 has its 
 own consciousness (p. 151). Only the lower centers operate at 
 
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- 
 activity 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. 
 He 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 has 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. 161). 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 OF THE NEWBOKtf 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 attainable, 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 OF 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 can 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 OF 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 bath 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. Now, 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 bad. A difficulty of 
 hearing continues to exist normally for a long time, 
 and this peculiarity is of great benefit to the child ; 
 
 for, if he were able to hear as well as an adult, he 
 3 
 
6 DEVELOPMENT OF 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 OF THE NEWBORN CHILD. 7 
 
 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 oculo- 
 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- 
 glionic cells. But it is certain that in man these cells 
 
THE SENSES OF THE NEWBORN CHILD. H 
 
 increase with extraordinary rapidity as his mental de- 
 velopment increases; and we are forced to attribute 
 to them an important role 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 with 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 OF 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. 
 No 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 OF 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 OF THE NEWBORN CHILD. 15 
 
 at all after a somewhat protracted trial. We can not v 
 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 newoorn numan being, is certain. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, AND TEMPERAMENTS 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, 
 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. If 
 
 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 peculiar interest 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 OF 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 months 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 OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 cedence. In sucking, which is the chief occupation 
 of ev,ery 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 
 
 4 
 
 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 nprmal 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, which 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," 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- 
 dividual 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, go 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 
 which 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. 27 
 
 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. He 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 whole 
 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 he 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 AND IDEAS. 
 
 IN 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 has 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. ~No 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 alojie 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, 
 
34: DEVELOPMENT OF 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 
 function. 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, he 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 i. 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 century 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 in^to 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 Newton 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 corne 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 OP 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. He 
 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 nature^ th6 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 for him, but lives more in the open air. The 
 regulation of the activity of the brain demands, pre- 
 cisely in the 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 be 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 upon 
 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 j 
 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. 47 
 
 allowed that thing 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. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE OKIGItf 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 Nature, 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 chiefly, 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 he 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 OF 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. 
 Now, 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 he 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- 
 
 S^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 OF THE WILL. 51 
 
 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 
 animal specially characteristic manifold, convulsive, 
 stretching movements, accompanied by spreading oi 
 the toes and fingers, 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 OF THE WILL. 53 
 
 world over movements subject to well-known laws, 
 and 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 in 
 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 
 lorn, because his cerebral cortex is not yet developed. 
 Some deliberation, however short, must interpose : 
 " How 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- I / 
 portant elements in the development of the will, it 
 appears that will depends chiefly on ideas, and hence 
 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 OF 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- 
 L_ternal impressions. In this consists the principal 
 problem of education in the nursery ; and precisely 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 bendings, 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 with 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 age 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 yet 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 OP 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 in 
 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 TEE 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 OF 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. 65 
 
 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. 
 
CHAPTEK Y. 
 
 THE CHILD'S FIRST 
 
 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 comet 
 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 and heat, of various tastes and smells 
 in fact, even the discrimination of light and dark, and 
 that of left and right all this no child can learn 
 through words. This is a field in which I have 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 preponderating^ 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. ft 
 
 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, as 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 that 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, but 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. ?5 
 
 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 way in which it 
 
76 DEVELOPMENT OF 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. ^ 
 
 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 
 are 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 dilettanteism. 
 The great thing is rather, as has long since been ex- 
 pressed very briefly and forcibly, " letting the child 
 alone." At the beginning of life the organic basis 
 
78 DEVELOPMENT OF 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 anaesthesia (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. 79 
 
 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 understanding 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. What 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. He 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 has 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 OF 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 " Eound 
 the other way," in regard to a ninepin, perhaps, that ] 
 is to be laid in a box, is not to be expressed by words. 
 When 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 thinking 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 LAKGUAGE 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 experiences, 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 
 8 
 
86 DEVELOPMENT OF 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 he 
 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 Eomanes trained 
 and caused to be trained, with 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 words 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. Bather 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 are but rarely found in 
 
 3 farther civilization spreads, 
 
 be possible for little children, 
 
 ent or malicious intent from 
 
 up in the wilderness partly 
 
 TS may pass before they are 
 
 unts of such cases have a pe- 
 
 > experiment can supply the 
 
 mately, the narratives extant 
 
 and defective ; they come 
 
 centuries, and have not been 
 
 >f 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. Rauber (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 Wallachian 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 are 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 nimbleness in jumping and running, espe- 
 cially on all-fours," but among human beings he grad- 
 ually took on " an orderly behavior," and married ; he 
 must, therefore, have learned also to walk upright 
 and to talk. 
 
 The Irish youth (in the seventeenth century) with- 
 
92 DEVELOPMENT OP 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' 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 OF 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 continually 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. In vain do we look for 
 signs of a higher intellectual activity in him, such as 
 we find in the normally formed child that grows up 
 in isolation, without the formative impressions of hu- 
 man society. 
 
 From these considerations we see how indispen- 
 sable for the development of the higher activity of 
 intellect in the child is the learning of speech. This 
 does not indeed generate reason, but without it reason 
 does not come to development. But we perceive also 
 that to the learning of language there go two kinds of 
 things : first, a plastic brain with the organs of sense 
 belonging to it; second, certain influences of other 
 human beings to act on these organs of sense and 
 thereby on the brain, so that it, while it is growing, 
 develops itself more finely in certain portions. Now, 
 how must the ideas be constituted which are requisite 
 
96 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN TEE CHILD. 
 
 for the learning of speech, and which make articulate 
 speech possible ? 
 
 This question can be satisfactorily answered only 
 when the nature of the impressions is ascertained 
 which act, on the part of the mother and the other 
 members of the family, particularly the elder brothers 
 and sisters, upon the child before it learns to speak. 
 These must first be considered, at any rate, because 
 without them language is not forthcoming. Here, 
 above all, must be mentioned the looks and gestures, 
 the changes of place, the various bodily movements of 
 the child's relatives. More effective even than the 
 voice, after the first three months, is the expression of 
 the countenance of the mother. Even in the second 
 month she may be recognized and localized, together 
 with her voice. Individual children distinguish with 
 certainty as early as the third month whether the 
 mother has a hat on or not ; and toward the end of 
 the first three months the signs of intellect are multi- 
 plied with surprising rapidity. The friendly look is 
 distinguished from the severe, the cheerful from the 
 serious, with accuracy. A slow turning away of the 
 mother's gaze is already an intelligible sign of dis- 
 approbation, while a barely perceptible raising of the 
 corners of the mouth indicates a satisfied frame of 
 mind, which the child with a smile understands. It is 
 as if between mother and child there existed a com- 
 munity of soul. She seems to think of the child even 
 
INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 97 
 
 in her sleep, and the child feels without words what its 
 mother wishes. A great number of adaptive move- 
 ments made by members of the family are understood 
 without the slightest possibility of imitating them or 
 of intentionally executing similar ones. The child's 
 look, when he is scanning the doings of adults about 
 him, often takes on an inquiring expression that is 
 strongly marked as early as the fifth month. Their 
 coming and going, their sitting down and standing up, 
 their walking and turning about, attract in a high 
 degree the attention of the infant. He gives one the 
 impression of studying what significance these changes 
 in his field of vision may have. Meanwhile he has de- 
 veloped the inherited, but never innate, movement of 
 seizing ; he stretches out his arms longingly, and he 
 examines by feeling not only inanimate things but 
 also the separate parts of the heads of his father and 
 mother, pulls at their hair, convincing himself that 
 it is firmly attached, also at their ears, and he fol- 
 lows with his gaze the movements of the hand that 
 is about to offer anything to him or to take some- 
 thing away. 
 
 A thing that did not make the least impression 
 during the first two months the quick thrusting 
 of the hand or of one's head at the face of the 
 babe now, after the eighth week has passed, sud- 
 denly produces a winking of the eyes, as in the case of 
 adults. This proves clearly that the sudden altera- 
 
98 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 tion in the babe's field of vision is perceived. The 
 movement I am speaking of is a very quick, responsive 
 movement, having the character of a reflex and an 
 acquired reflex. But it is not of the same order as the 
 before-mentioned alteration of the pupil when the eye 
 is suddenly exposed to light. This latter reflex is 
 hereditary and innate, and does not require for its ex- 
 istence so high an order of brain centers as does the 
 other visual reflex, which does not appear until the 
 visual spheres have entered upon their function. 
 Hence I regard this winking of the eyes as a cri- 
 terion for the beginning of a higher cerebral activ- 
 ity, and in particular of the representation, in idea, 
 of a movement. For if the closing of the lid follows, 
 there must take place an intellectual elaboration, how- 
 ever brief, of an alteration in the field of vision a 
 process that had not taken place previously. Previ- 
 ously you might sprinkle water on the eye, and the eye 
 would not be closed ; now you can not approach the 
 eye without occasioning the closing of the lid. But 
 when this reaction is once inaugurated, it remains 
 throughout the whole life ; and, as we know, a good 
 deal of practice and of self-control are needed to re- 
 frain from starting when a hand is suddenly thrust 
 at the face, even when there is a glass plate be- 
 tween the two. There is in this movement a kind of 
 defense against a disagreeble impression. Every con- 
 siderable sudden alteration in the field of vision, even 
 
INTELLECT WITHOUT LANGUAGE. 99 
 
 when it has agreeable consequences, is yet disagreeable 
 at the first instant on account of its suddenness. And 
 if the infant has perceived this, he already manifests 
 intellect ; and his lid-movement might be designated 
 as the first expression of it, as a speech without 
 words. 
 
 But he speaks, very soon after this, through a 
 whole series of other movements which gradually 
 emerge out of the incoordinate, aimless, partly im- 
 pulsive, partly reflexive, and instinctive muscular 
 contractions that he brings with him into the world. 
 Thus even the persistent holding up of the head, which 
 no child accomplishes before the beginning of the 
 third month, is in itself an expression of incipient 
 thinking, though of a very primitive sort. It proves 
 that the great disadvantages of the wabbling of the 
 head hither and thither, of its falling forward or to 
 the right or left or backward, are perceived. The 
 strength of the muscles of the neck would have sufficed 
 to hold the head up earlier, but no necessity existed 
 for it so long as the seeing and hearing, the taking of 
 nourishment, and the manifold movements of the 
 limbs, went on well enough without the participation 
 of the head movements. Now, the great advantage of 
 turnings of the head, particularly in looking to the 
 right or left, up and down, over and under, is per- 
 ceived ; and from this time on (during the sixteenth 
 week in some individuals) the head is held quite erect, 
 
100 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 and this attitude is a further language without words. 
 It says, " I will." 
 
 Although not many combined muscular move- 
 ments at so early a period can be demonstrated to be 
 signs of advancing intelligence, as perhaps the shaking 
 of the head in refusal, the raising of the upper part of 
 the body without help, so many the more of them 
 there are in the second half year. In particular, the 
 pointing that is developed out of seizing, the first 
 attempts at learning to sit, to stand, to walk, to avoid 
 table corners and other obstacles, the first efforts to 
 get up, to step over a threshold, the carefulness shown 
 in doing it, as well as the fear of falling these things, 
 occurring with many children long before they learn 
 to talk, prove the existence of deliberation and of a 
 speech without words. 
 
 So, too, we must regard as a proof, and a weighty 
 one, of the formation of associations of ideas previous 
 to articulate speech, the rapid appropriation by the 
 little child of many conventional looks, gestures, and 
 occupations of adults. Not that special deliberation 
 ! is required for smiling when smiled at, for drawing 
 down the corners of the mouth when scolded at, for 
 crying when struck, for making defensive movements 
 when seized hold of ; what we are concerned with is 
 rather a whole series of complicated imitative move- 
 ments that are multiplied especially at the end of the 
 first year of life. Combing and sewing, brushing and 
 
INTELLECT WITHOUT LA^GUA^E. 10 1 
 
 wiping, reading and writing, greeting and shaking 
 hands, kissing and laughing all these things are 
 more or less adroitly imitated. And although the 
 significance of these movements is in part not yet 
 understood, still the fact itself of imitation, without 
 any accompanying verbal explanation on the part of 
 the parents, and without a single word spoken by the 
 child, is surely a proof of the existence of a delibera- 
 tion that prepares the way for verbal language. The 
 childish imagination masters every movement that can 
 serve as entertainment. Complete understanding of 
 most of the movements, however, is not gained by the 
 little imitative automaton except by means of the 
 aid of verbal language. Meanwhile there exists long 
 beforehand an imperfect understanding of what is 
 done by adults and by other children, and an un- 
 mistakable language without words. By means of 
 looks and a distinctly marked play of gesture in which 
 the arms take an important part, the will of the child 
 is expressed before he can speak with the tongue. By 
 many independent combinations in his silent play the 
 child makes known that he has ideas, that he asso- 
 ciates them and separates them, before he speaks a sin- 
 gle word. And this understanding without language 
 places him, even in his first year of life, at a height far 
 above those pitiable patients who, through injury to 
 the brain, can no longer use language properly, be- 
 cause they are confused, because they can no longer 
 
10-2 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 hold their ideas in connection with one another, and 
 can no longer rightly separate them from one another. 
 Their language without intellect has no significance, 
 but the child's intellect without language forms the 
 foundation of the whole later mental life. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 
 
 UNFORTUNATELY, no one remembers the time 
 when he had not command of speech. Although 
 every educated person has labored for years with great 
 zeal to learn his mother-tongue, and to perfect him- 
 self in the use of it, yet no one knows now what his 
 feelings were before he began this self-instruction. 
 Nor is it possible, by the most careful questioning of 
 the child who is learning to speak, to get information 
 concerning his intellectual condition ; inasmuch as 
 when he knows it he can not communicate anything 
 of it in words, and later, when he has learned to talk, 
 the remembrance of that speechless condition has 
 vanished. And yet what a contrast there is between 
 the babe, speechless, powerless, resembling in more 
 than one respect the brute, comparable now to the 
 larva, greedy for food, now to the sluggish, hibernat- 
 ing animal what a contrast between him and the 
 orator who uses words with precision, who is never at 
 a loss for the right expression, and with no adventi- 
 
104 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 tious aids, merely by his speech, merely by means of 
 the vibration of his vocal cords, powerfully affects his 
 hearers ! I still remember well the time when, after 
 unspeakably toilsome but fruitless efforts to teach my 
 son one single word only, I used to be possessed almost 
 every day by the thought, " And this awkward crea- 
 ture, who can not even blab a single syllable in imita- 
 tion, like a parrot, is one day to talk with me as I talk 
 with him ! to be perhaps a speaker in the Legislature, 
 to learn in addition to his mother-tongue other lan- 
 guages also ! I am curious to observe this metamor- 
 phosis; but it is sometimes very doubtful to me 
 whether the child will ever be able to learn to speak." 
 Other parents have assuredly like thoughts ; and their 
 joy at the first words spoken by their children, if less 
 pronounced than their delight at the first walking 
 erect without assistance, is so, probably, merely for 
 the reason that the speech does not make its appear- 
 ance so suddenly. We should be in possession of 
 much better material concerning the child's becoming 
 a human being, a process completed by the acquire- 
 ment of speech, if parents would more often conscien- 
 tiously put upon paper what they hear of the first at- 
 tempts at speaking, and would furnish us with the 
 correct dates. It may be declared almost an impos- 
 sibility that a sound child, growing up among human 
 beings, should not learn to speak. Thus there is no 
 lack of material for observation. 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 1Q5 
 
 So far as I know, however, I am the only one who 
 has carried through a series of observations upon a 
 child, including almost every day from the beginning 
 of his life until the end of his third year. I strongly 
 advise the repetition of this labor, for it heightens the 
 parent's joy in the child, and furthers the knowledge 
 of mental development, even when the observer is not 
 a physiologist. This study, from the nature of the 
 case (let me say as a recommendation of it), is less 
 likely to put out of tune an artistic temperament, with 
 the employment of analysis and taking to pieces, than 
 is any other kind of scientific observation, for the rea- 
 son that the child's ever-recurring amusing attempts 
 to repeat words that are too difficult for him, and in 
 general the synthetic character that pervades the whole 
 process of the acquirement of speech, give a high de- 
 gree of gratification. Think, too, of the joyous child- 
 face, and we may be sure that such observations as I 
 desire and as I shall be glad to make use of, provided 
 only they are trustworthy, do not by any means neces- 
 sitate unusual effort ; especially as they should never 
 be long continued at any one time, lest the child may 
 become wearied. 
 
 The main thing, rather, in studying the acquire- 
 ment of speech is to make very frequent, occasional, 
 but always brief, observations of one and the same 
 child, who is in the normal condition. He must not 
 know, even after our first studies are over, that we are 
 
106 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 interested in his imperfect utterances; else all too 
 easily is lost the naivete that never returns, the child- 
 like naturalness that precludes all dissimulation. If 
 this happens, the natural course of development of 
 the learning of speech is disturbed also. 
 
 The first thing with which the learning of speech 
 begins is not, as was formerly assumed, the first cry 
 of the newly born, for this can have no other signifi- 
 cance than that of a reflex, like sneezing, for instance. 
 In fact, it often occurs that children announce their 
 entrance into the world by a sneeze instead of a cry. 
 But when strong impressions of various kinds have 
 alternated with one another when feelings such as 
 hunger, pain, cold, on the one hand, and satiety, 
 pleasure, warmth, on the other, have been discrimi- 
 nated, then crying acquires a speech-significance, and 
 the mood of the child may be perceived through the 
 variations in his voice. In pain the tone is higher 
 than in hunger often a piercing tone; in the joy- 
 ous " crowing," in laughing, it is much louder and 
 of quite different timbre than in whimpering on ac- 
 count of cold or wet. But all loud utterances of this 
 sort that express bodily, and very soon also mental, 
 states, are the farthest possible from being portions 
 of an articulate language ; rather are they completely 
 analogous to the language of animals. Nor have those 
 syllables the least claim to significance as language 
 which are heard sometimes as early as the seventh or 
 
THE LEARNING OP SPEECH. 1Q7 
 
 eighth week, but which have not been observed hith- 
 erto with sufficient accuracy as to the date of their 
 first appearance : as Z>a, ma, am, ab, go, and also ro. 
 These are produced, just as are the later sounds, which 
 can not be in any way written down, in the babbling 
 monologues of 'the infant, by the movements of the 
 vocal muscles, often through pure accident ; and they 
 have at the beginning no more psychogenetic signifi- 
 cance than snoring, or the irregular, gradually co- 
 ordinated movements of the arms and legs or of the 
 facial muscles. The production of sounds, and of 
 simple, meaningless syllables made up of sounds, has 
 for the child, however, an advantage over these mus- 
 cular movements because it has an acoustic effect. 
 The ear of the crying and babbling babe receives 
 the sounds produced by the larynx and the oral 
 cavity, so that these become the source of a new 
 pleasure. Therefore the child repeats, with a per- 
 sistence often intolerable to the adult, the same syl- 
 lable, the same cry. 
 
 These utterances even in the third quarter of the 
 first year are still almost wholly devoid of significance 
 as language ; but in the fourth quarter the character 
 of them very often changes, and we may perceive that 
 sounds uttered are influenced by the sounds heard from 
 other persons, by words. With this is reached the 
 critical point in the learning of language. That point 
 is passed on the day when the child for the first time 
 
108 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 uses a word of verbal language, or of the nurse's jargon, 
 independently and correctly. 
 
 If we consider what is required for all this, and 
 therefore for speech in general, it appears that there 
 must be, first, an open ear, 0, to receive and conduct 
 the sounds heard ; a permeable impress- 
 D i ve path, as it is most briefly termed, be- 
 
 M MJL K ginning with the auditory nerves, K. 
 o The sound-impressions arriving at a cer- 
 tain place in the brain, an acoustic center, 
 or storehouse of sound-images, K, must then in the 
 form of nerve excitement, quite probably through vi- 
 brations, come, through intercentral connecting fibers, 
 to a part of the surface of the cerebrum situated far- 
 ther forward, D, where ideas are formed out of them, 
 and therefore where what is heard is understood. 
 From here, partly also directly from the center for 
 sound-images, K, go fibers to the before-mentioned 
 Broca's center in the frontal brain, M, where the ideas 
 are transformed into motor impulses for the laryngeal 
 muscles by the expansion and contraction of the 
 glottis, by means of the vocal cords, and for the 
 lingual and labial muscles, etc. This place is the 
 center that is often disturbed by attacks of apoplexy, 
 and by the lesion or injury of which, through the 
 rupture, it may be, of a small blood-vessel, language 
 may be momentarily lost in part, and is in many cases 
 wholly lost. In the first event the consequence is 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 1Q9 
 
 dysphasia ; in the second, aphasia. This speech cen- 
 ter is not developed in the child, and if children grew 
 up isolated from all human intercourse, it would not 
 develop any more than would the other cerebral cen- 
 ters and their connecting fibers necessary for speech. 
 
 He who has not learned to write has no writing 
 center in his brain. And as the child at a later time 
 learns to write by imitating a copy, so in like manner 
 he learns after the lapse of the first year to speak by 
 imitating sounds heard. Imitation is the chief thing 
 in all learning to speak, no matter whether the signs 
 that constitute the language are visible, tactual, or 
 audible signs. The word, too, is ultimately a symbol 
 produced by feeling (or touching) with the tongue in 
 the mouth, like gesticulation with the hands and the 
 play of feature. 
 
 And although philologists may still dispute much 
 over the possibility of the origin of language from 
 other sources, nevertheless sound imitation is and 
 remains without doubt the first and most important 
 factor in the learning of language by the individual. 
 No arrogant or even scornful rejection of the ono- 
 matopoetic theory, such as Max Miiller announces by 
 the term " bow-wow theory," no learned consideration 
 of Sanskrit roots, no result of comparative philology, 
 can shake the fact which everybody may confirm 
 in the case of his own children if he only observes 
 carefully and diligently, that through the repetition 
 
HO DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 of sounds heard the human being comes to associate 
 these arbitrarily with certain definite ideas, in the con- 
 nection in which they have been heard. 
 
 It is remarkable enough that the vibrations of the 
 tympanum produced, in hearing, by the waves of 
 sound, as early as at the end of the first year of life, 
 and often much earlier, are transferred with the 
 greatest accuracy to the vocal cords of the child that 
 hears. A tone heard is sung correctly, a sound heard 
 is repeated accurately with the same timbre, in the 
 same pitch and about the same force ; and yet the 
 way, the path, must be open all through : from the 
 vibrating tympanum through the auditory ossicles, the 
 oval aperture, the fluid of the labyrinth, the cochlea, 
 the auditory nerves, the auditory nerve ganglia, the 
 fibers connecting with the cerebrum, the auditory 
 spheres, and the motor centers of the cerebral cortex, 
 as well as the motor nerves for the laryngeal muscles. 
 First, sound-vibrations, hence condensation and rare- 
 faction of the air : then, vibrations of solid bodies, the 
 tympanum and the auditory ossicles; next, vibrations 
 of a fluid and of the elastic ends of, the auditory 
 nerves in the labyrinth ; after this, nerve excitement ; 
 finally, transformation of this nerve excitement into 
 the sensation of sound. Out of this arises the idea 
 of tone, and then the will to reproduce the content of 
 it; following this, motor command in the form of 
 centrifugal nerve excitement, muscular contraction, 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 
 
 tension of vocal cords, contraction of the glottis, ex- 
 halation lo ! the tone that had been heard ! What 
 a chain of complicated processes, which must all take 
 place in a perfectly definite succession, in order to the 
 existence of a phenomenon apparently so simple as 
 the imitation of a sound heard, an A ! Yet so it is ; 
 and if a single link in this long chain is wanting 
 if the internal ear is injured, or if the auditory 
 nerve does not conduct, or if the cerebrum declines 
 its office, or the motor nerves of the laryngeal muscles, 
 or if these muscles themselves are paralyzed then 
 the child does not learn to speak. On a very slight 
 thread hangs the whole weight of the higher intel- 
 lectual activity! 
 
 Of course, the recognition of this important fact 
 does not by any means imply that nothing further 
 is requisite for learning to speak than that these 
 impressive and conducting paths should perform their 
 normal function. But it is certain and this is the 
 chief point that without this whole apparatus ar- 
 ticulate speech has never been acquired, either in 
 primeval times by any human being previously lack- 
 ing speech, or by the ancestor of such a one, a being 
 nearer akin to the brute ; or in our own days by an 
 infant, who likewise stands nearer to the brute than 
 to the civilized man, in regard to his inability to 
 speak. The further thing that is indispensable is 
 something purely mental, viz., the association of a 
 
112 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 sound, acquired by imitation and self -produced, with 
 the experience gained in the perception of the sound. 
 Experience brings to ripeness a certain idea. Now, if 
 the sound which has always occurred along with the 
 idea is heard by itself, that experience emerges anew 
 out of the memory-image, and occasions on its part 
 the production, which is a reproduction, of the same 
 sound : so that when this sound is uttered we know 
 that the child has this or that idea. 
 
 This will be made plain- by an example. My little 
 son touches with his hand the hot stove, draws back 
 the hand quickly, and speaks the single word " Hot," 
 very loud and distinctly. While he is doing this his 
 countenance takes on an expression that one might 
 describe by saying that his face was " lighted up." 
 This was the first word of proper language that he 
 used spontaneously with perfect correctness. The 
 sound-impression " hot " had often penetrated his ear, 
 and always in connection with the idea of a high 
 temperature. Now the child gets for himself the 
 experience that an object has an unexpectedly high 
 temperature ; he receives the idea of heat, and this 
 idea calls up the acoustic memory-image " hot." Pre- 
 viously, the words spoken in his hearing, among them 
 this one, had been merely " parroted " without mean- 
 ing, and often in mutilated form ; previously, too, the 
 feeling of heat, or the pain felt on grasping objects 
 too hot, had come, but without the knowledge of 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. H3 
 
 the word "hot." JSTow the association of the two 
 is accomplished, and only in this way that some 
 person, having burned himself or having taken hold of 
 the kettle, had said in the presence of the child, " That 
 is too hot." 
 
 In this way the child learns to know a great num- 
 ber of words of his future language, and learns at the 
 same time to give names to his sensations, feelings, 
 perceptions, ideas. Yet this is not the sole way that 
 leads to this goal. A considerable number of words 
 are at first used by him wrongly or in mutilated form, 
 with reduplications and with abbreviations, in igno- 
 rance of the true meaning. The right meaning be- 
 comes clear to him -only after repeated wrong use of 
 the words. How often does the child that is learning 
 to talk remind us of the illiterate person, who perverts 
 words and uses them in a wrong sense, saying " coni- 
 fer " for " corypheus," " abrupt " for " absurd," or 
 " spiritual " instead of " spirituous " liquors. 
 
 A third factor in the learning of speech is of much 
 less importance the impressing of idea and word al- 
 most simultaneously, as when an animal is both seen 
 and heard. Wholly original word-formation of this 
 sort pure onomatopoeia, that is is a thing not easy 
 to observe. Children for the most part name animals, 
 which they generally name by the sound, as "moo- 
 moo," " bow-wow," " cock-a-doodle-doo," " quack," not 
 spontaneously, but only after they have learned the 
 
114: DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 use of other words, and have often heard these desig- 
 nations employed by other persons. As to the expres- 
 sion "peep-peep" for a bird, however, I can positively 
 affirm that it is a spontaneous invention of a child. 
 Other imitations of voices of animals, and of squeak- 
 ing, humming, snarling, whistling noises, are mostly 
 given to children early in words frequently uttered 
 before them ; such words are not kept long in use be- 
 cause they are individual in their character. On the 
 other hand, a bad thing connected with the learning 
 of speech is this : that the parents, and still more the 
 nurses and like persons, purposely talk with the child 
 not in the ordinary language but in so-called " baby- 
 talk." In this, one does not speak in the first or the 
 second person, does not say " I " or " you " ; but the 
 aunt, in speaking of herself, says " auntie " instead of 
 " I " ; the child is put into the third person. The 
 strangest malformations, particularly of nouns, are 
 regularly preferred; e. g., "Huddup" (Hotto) for 
 horse, " mimi " for milk, " by-by " for bed. Consistent 
 with this but wholly needless, and in reality harmful, 
 the members of the family seize on certain syllables 
 that frequently recur in the babbling monologues of 
 the child, and say them over again and again, in one 
 form or another, to the child, in connection with 
 closely associated ideas. By so doing they make diffi- 
 cult for the child a natural development, for he must 
 by and by wean himself from all this; that which 
 
THE LEARNING OP SPEECH. H5 
 
 at first seemed amusing, childishly naive, and even 
 clever, but is in reality artificial and affected, is later 
 condemned as naughtiness, is visited with punishment, 
 and must at all events be got rid of. To what pur- 
 pose is this dead weight? Children should never, at 
 the expense of their own natural development, be- 
 come entertaining playthings to pass away the time 
 for adults. 
 
 It is the same with provincialisms and improper 
 interjections, even with individual peculiarities of ex- 
 pression, with accent, sometimes with cadence. All 
 this is by many children imitated with great precision. 
 It is not noticed, and by and by we wonder at the 
 defective, indistinct, disagreeable enunciation of chil- 
 dren. Even when there is no intention on the part 
 of the adult members of the family of imparting to 
 the child their peculiarities of speech, the repetition 
 of such peculiarities becomes to the children a habit 
 merely through hearing. It is supposed that they 
 will at a later period break themselves of these, but 
 they retain them usually for life. Here must not be 
 forgotten what has been spoken of as decisive in re- 
 gard to the earliest education in general the suggest- 
 ive effect of the conduct of the mother. Every look, 
 every word, many movements of the limbs, are, with- 
 out the knowledge of the mother or nurse, suggestions 
 to the child i. e., they determine his mental repre- 
 sentation, and later his action. And particularly to 
 
HO DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 be considered in the matter of learning to speak is the 
 lack of understanding of what is heard and seen. A 
 fundamental axiom of the whole doctrine of psycho- 
 genesis is, that all children at the time of learning to 
 speak understand, indeed, many more words than 
 they can themselves utter; but they also say many 
 words " mechanically " which they do not understand, 
 and with which they do not associate the right mean- 
 ing until later, and then mostly in consequence of 
 disagreeable experiences from wrong applications of 
 them, but sometimes in consequence of pleasurable 
 feelings from the right application. 
 
 If the little child's defects of speech from the be- 
 ginning of his life to somewhere about the fifth year 
 are compared, with reference to the hearing and un- 
 derstanding of what is said to him as well as with refer- 
 ence to pronunciation and independent use of articu- 
 late sounds, syllables, and words for the expression of 
 his own ideas if his defects are compared with those 
 that appear in later life, a surprising agreement is 
 found. When an adult, in consequence of a stroke of 
 apoplexy, lesion, or any cerebral disease, disorder of 
 hearing, derangement of the functions of the larynx 
 or of the tongue, lips, or even teeth, is deprived of the 
 right use of speech, then the disturbances of speech, 
 which have been carefully observed by various clini- 
 cists, are not merely somewhat similar in general, but 
 are identical with those of the child just learning to 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 
 
 speak. The adult no longer speaks correctly, and no 
 longer understands speech correctly, because his speech 
 mechanism is no longer normally constructed. The 
 child, on the other hand, does not yet speak correctly, 
 and does not understand speech correctly, because his 
 small speech apparatus is not yet fully developed in 
 all its parts. In both cases the cerebral convolution 
 concerned is not capable of its function. In the one, 
 the watch does not go, because it is broken and there- 
 fore can no longer be wound up : in the other, it does 
 not go, and can not be wound up, because it is not 
 finished. It should be noted here that every normal 
 infant understands many of the sound-impressions of 
 animate nature and of inanimate objects at a time 
 when he can reproduce by imitation hardly anything 
 of it. He never develops perfectly without inter- 
 course with adults, without prolonged practice in 
 guessing at the meaning of acoustic impressions ; and 
 this very thing proves conclusively the importance of 
 this practice for intellectual development in general, 
 and for the development of the brain in particular. 
 
 The guessing or divining of the meaning is far 
 more a matter of understanding the accompanying 
 gestures and looks than of understanding the spoken 
 explanations. On the other hand, every normal child, 
 of his own accord, before he is able to imitate sylla- 
 bles, forms correctly all, or nearly all, the sounds that 
 
 occur in his future speech, and many others besides 
 10 
 
118 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 these ; he takes pleasure in making sounds which will 
 not be used at a later period, and will be lost. There 
 is a lavish abundance of sounds of the most manifold 
 character. Out of these a selection comes to be made, 
 an unconscious selection, determined by the language 
 the child hears spoken by those about him. Those 
 sounds which prove to be of advantage in understand- 
 ing remain in use ; those which are of no advantage 
 fade out, as it were, or fall away like dead leaves, just 
 as do the useless crowing, squealing, cooing, grunting, 
 whimpering, and all the numerous inarticulate sounds 
 we have no names for that are made by the child in 
 the first few months. 
 
 But this decline in the child's stock of sounds does 
 not by any means take place in a definite order of suc- 
 cession any more than the acquirement of the sounds 
 of language does, with the exception of a few sounds 
 that appear in all human beings in the same order. 
 The different languages are too unlike, and the influ- 
 ences of the members of the family upon children, 
 even in the same nation, are too unlike for it to be 
 possible that the preference of certain definite sounds 
 to all other sounds should be repeated everywhere in a 
 like order of succession. The a, p, and m sounds only, 
 in which the tongue remains motionless in the mouth, 
 are found in all peoples as the first sounds to be ut- 
 tered distinctly ; and by combination, ma, pa, am, ab, 
 ama, papa, mama, are the first sounds to designate 
 
THE LEARNING OP SPEECH. H9 
 
 that which appeases the disagreeable feeling of hun- 
 'ger, viz., food, and hence milk, or the source of milk, 
 the breast, and likewise the mother herself. But this 
 application is not made by the child first, but by the 
 mother, who repeats the sounds made by the child 
 i. e., she imitates the child's utterance, and he then 
 imitates hers. 
 
 The difference in individuals is very great also in 
 the later time of the child's learning of language, 
 when his vocabulary increases gradually and ever more 
 and more rapidly. Apart from the fact that many 
 children are fond of babbling senselessly in monkey 
 fashion whatever sounds they happen to hear, while 
 other children try in a more thoughtful manner 
 silently to understand what they hear, the inanimate, 
 dumb environment of the child determines his use of 
 some words, particularly of nouns. A child growing 
 up in a flat region of country will not be likely to see 
 much of mountains and glaciers, valleys and preci- 
 pices ; the son of a farmer will much sooner name cor- 
 rectly all that belongs to cow-house and barn than 
 will the child of a fisherman, for whom, on the other 
 hand, it is easy to name all parts of the boat even be- 
 fore he can speak correctly in other respects. 
 
 In reply to repeated questions concerning the num- 
 ber of words mastered by a child at the end of his 
 second year i. e., the words he uses independently 
 I have received from various mothers, who have ob- 
 
120 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 served carefully, lists which show that the vocabularies 
 of nine children just two years old eight girls and 
 one boy comprise, in the case of the smallest num- 
 ber of words, 173, and of the largest, 1,121 words. 
 But these extremes owe their great variation probably 
 far more to the difference in the way of observing 
 than to the actual difference in the children ; for in 
 the one case the observer was very strict in excluding 
 all doubtful expressions, while in the other case the 
 words of a dictionary were marked, and the child was 
 asked a question in the answer to which he might 
 employ the word under consideration. In this latter 
 case suggestion has probably exerted a strong influ- 
 ence to increase the number of words. The remain- 
 ing seven children had each a vocabulary of four to 
 five hundred words. In a single case observed by me, 
 strangely enough not fifty words were completely mas- 
 tered in the twenty-fourth month; but we can not 
 rom this infer anything abnormal in regard to a 
 child. A great many more such collections of words 
 must be made and compared, and much more accurate 
 data must be at our disposal concerning the times at 
 which the acquirement of words takes place, before 
 we can draw definite conclusions in this department, 
 which until recently has received no consideration. I 
 am told that I did not myself learn to speak until 
 toward the close of my third year ; and the child of 
 whom I said just now that he had not at the end of 
 
THE LEARNING OF SPEECH. 121 
 
 his second year fifty words at his command is my 
 own son ; he, however, very soon made up his defi- 
 ciency. In this matter we may naturally think of 
 hereditary peculiarities, but, on the whole, heredity is 
 at all events of slight importance in regard to the 
 learning of speech. For experience demonstrates that 
 every child can, by virtue of the extraordinary plas- 
 ticity of his entire apparatus of speech, if he is re- 
 moved early from his parents, learn to master any 
 language whatever instead of his mother tongue, and 
 just as perfectly as that. 
 
 A wonderful thing it seems, to be sure, that every 
 human being that comes into the world in sound con- 
 dition shows no trace at first of articulate speech, and 
 yet after a year's time has in part acquired this ex- 
 tremely complex function. For he can acquire it 
 only through intercourse with such as already enjoy 
 the gift of speech and who serve as models for his 
 imitation ; while if we go back farther and farther 
 in the history of mankind, we come at last to gen- 
 erations who had no such models. Every tradition 
 and language is a tradition must at some time 
 have had a beginning ; but as to the nature of the 
 beginning of this, the most important of the tradi- 
 tions of the human race, who would care to make 
 positive assertions? One thing is certain: that imi- 
 tation must have been previously developed. The 
 imitation of natural'sounds must in any case be con- 
 
122 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 sidered as an essential element. A second element is 
 the simultaneous utterance of sounds by a number of 
 men engaged in the same kind of bodily labor (Max 
 Miiller) : the sounds thus produced are afterward 
 imitated by other persons. A third constituent is the 
 explosive, voiced expiration of breath under stress of 
 pain or of any violent emotion. All these must have 
 co-operated to produce language. Imitation would 
 naturally lead to the formation of root- words. Out 
 of these, by means of the combination of words and 
 the extended differentiation of them, has been devel- 
 oped at length the vast number of languages now 
 spread over the globe and acquired by children through 
 imitation of the speech of their kindred. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 
 
 THE mere appropriation of words does not carry 
 the development of thinking on the part of the child 
 beyond the primitive state that existed before. Nor 
 does the loose juxtaposition of the first nouns and 
 adjectives in a sentence prove anything as yet in 
 regard to the formation of higher ideas, of abstrac- 
 tions. For example, when the child who has ac- 
 cidentally pushed off his cup, filled with milk, from 
 the edge of the table, tells his mother of it in the 
 words, "Mik-mik tarpet papa fie!" he does not 
 in this rise above the standpoint of a person that is 
 all through life feeble-minded, who would in like 
 manner say : " [The] milk [ran down on the] carpet ; 
 [then came] papa [and said] ' Fie ! ' ' The omission 
 of a great many words, particularly of the articles, 
 conjunctions and prepositions, but also of verbs and 
 pronouns, is characteristic for this first period of the 
 forming of sentences. But in truth the intelligent 
 child has before this strung together these same ideas, 
 
124: DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 and like the uninstructed deaf-mute has expressed 
 them by various inarticulate sounds, as is the case 
 with many brute animals also. The difference is 
 rather in the greater clearness of the manner of desig- 
 nating the ideas than in anything else. When a child 
 has acquired words of his mother-tongue and begins 
 to express his own thoughts in them, then he can bet- 
 ter discriminate between these thoughts. Language 
 is an important auxiliary to him in separating indi- 
 vidual qualities and holding them permanently apart 
 in his mind. It lightens the task of arranging and 
 systematizing his stock of thoughts, which is daily 
 increasing in extent. 
 
 Yet even with this verbal announcement of his 
 own sensations, perceptions, and ideas of tangible, 
 visible objects, he has not attained, by any means, an 
 advance in the formation of higher ideas or concepts. 
 For this advance he has need of two more intellectual 
 processes, distinct though intimately connected with 
 each other memory and association. 
 
 The memory for words, and that for objects, are 
 by no means the same. A man may have in his head, 
 as is proved in the case of many linguists, twenty 
 thousand, or even thirty thousand words very likely 
 more than double that number without being able to 
 represent to himself at once that which each word 
 signifies. And vice versa, experienced naturalists can 
 represent to themselves many thousands of different 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 125 
 
 microscopic forms one after the other without being 
 able to designate their differences immediately in 
 words so as to make these clear to other persons. But 
 after the first baptism that comes with the grasping 
 of objects with the hands, the thing and the word 
 hold fast to each other, so that when the child hears 
 the sound-impression of the word, he has immediately 
 the sensuous impression of the thing denoted by the 
 sound has this partly in reality, partly in his im- 
 agination. If the thing is visible and tangible, the 
 impression has, as it were, a higher degree of reality 
 through the association of an object, that has been 
 both seen and felt, with the sound that has been heard. 
 
 I long ago made the statement that the child's 
 memory in any single department of sense is weak, 
 and that during the period when he can not yet speak 
 he remembers far more easily in case of the combina- 
 tion of two impressions belonging to two different 
 senses than when limited to one sense. A recent 
 observer Prof. Mark Baldwin, of Toronto has, how- 
 ever, furnished a particularly convincing proof that 
 the memory is favored by such a combination of mem- 
 ory-images from two departments of sense. 
 
 The nurse of a child six and a half years old, with 
 whom the child had lived for five months, left it for 
 three weeks, and was instructed upon her return, first 
 (I), to appear in her ordinary dress but without speak- 
 ing; then (II), to speak in her ordinary manner with- 
 
126 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 out being seen; finally (III), to appear and sing a 
 song that the child had not heard during the three 
 weeks of the nurse's absence. At (I) the child stared 
 with a questioning look but gave no sign of recogni- 
 tion, and no sign, to be sure, of fear or antipathy as at 
 the sight of a stranger. At (II) there was no recogni- 
 tion; the voice, therefore, did not suffice. At (III) 
 the recognition was complete. Accordingly, the visual 
 memory-image (the face) must have strengthened 
 the auditory memory-image (the melody), and this 
 strengthening may well have been a reciprocal one. 
 
 I know for a certainty that in recognizing persons 
 not seen for a long time, in my own case and in that 
 of many others, the hearing of the voice often first re- 
 moves the doubt felt on seeing the face, and vice versa. 
 Here we have a true association with which language 
 has nothing to do. But if language enough has been 
 acquired (by a child) so that the word heard awakens 
 the remembrance of the speech, then a sufficient prep- 
 aration has been attained to make possible, at the 
 perception of new things, the remembrance of the 
 word that had designated a similar thing before. 
 Thus the word awakens the remembrance of an ear- 
 lier experience; and a new experience of a similar 
 kind, or even with one similar characteristic, awakens 
 the remembrance of the word once earlier associated 
 with this. If this association of remembrances with 
 present impressions is just as reciprocal as in the ex- 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 127 
 
 ample adduced from the experience of a child without 
 speech and there is reason enough for assuming this 
 then we have the conditions for the formation of 
 higher ideas that do not correspond to previous expe- 
 riences. For when the new image does not corre- 
 spond to the one previously impressed, and hence the 
 old word does not clothe itself with the new impres- 
 sion, then one is constrained to designate the differ- 
 ence ; and this difference is always something abstract. 
 
 All ideas are either individual ideas, i. e., sense- 
 percepts, or general ideas, i. e., concepts. In the 
 child all words, even if formed only by onomatopoeia, 
 are naturally very poorly defined, very comprehensive, 
 hence scanty in content and vague ; because the child 
 has but few words at his disposal, and is obliged to ex- 
 press with these few vocables an overwhelming multi- 
 tude of sense-impressions and their consequences in 
 himself. 
 
 With the adult, the trained thinker, on the other 
 hand, the concepts have a small extent and are sharp- 
 ly defined, and are in so far of more value i. e., they 
 have a more definite content and are clear. When a 
 child who has observed that two callers, coining in 
 one after the other, cleared their throats vigorously, 
 founds upon this twofold experience the generaliza- 
 tion that all men clear their throats when entering a 
 room, he does not indeed proceed upon a false prin- 
 ciple, but he makes a false application of a true prin- 
 
128 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 ciple. It is thus that the young naturalist, not yet 
 sufficiently guarded by experience and critical judg- 
 ment, makes the childish error of inferring from the 
 sporadic occurrence of iodine in wood the universal 
 diffusion of this metalloid in the vegetable kingdom ; 
 as if from a few individual instances could be deduced 
 propositions of universal validity, or as if the law that 
 holds good of great numbers of instances could be ap- 
 plied to numbers not great. The derivation of new 
 truths by induction from too small a number of indi- 
 vidual instances, or the generalizing of particular per- 
 ceptions that offer certain resemblances but are few in 
 number, forms all through childhood the chief factor 
 in the production of higher concepts. 
 
 The truth of this statement may be easily illus- 
 trated by daily examples from the life of any child. 
 On the other hand, it is not so easy to understand that 
 the abstract idea is arrived at through the above-men- 
 tioned difference between a new impression and an 
 old memory-image of a similar impression, when both 
 are retained in the memory with the same word, for 
 lack of a proper word ; indeed, the knowledge that this 
 is the fact I believe to be new. Every time a new 
 word is formed abstraction is involved ; for the very 
 necessity of designating a new animal, a new plant, 
 by a special expression, in order to keep it separate in 
 the remembrance from others similar to it, presup- 
 poses a comparison through which differences of qual- 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 129 
 
 ities are perceived. How much more must this be 
 the case when it is not a matter of natural objects of 
 a striking character like plants and animals, but of 
 geometrical figures conceived by the mind, or of com- 
 plex numbers and their functions! Without signs 
 for these objects of thought, without letters and fig- 
 ures, a theory of numbers would never have existed. 
 Further, it is to the development of subtile distinc- 
 tions between ideas by means of words that we owe 
 all our metaphysics and a great part of philosophy 
 and theology, and no small portion of the science of 
 law. Such a development is found only among civil- 
 ized nations. On the other hand, ability as contrasted 
 with knowledge, art as opposed to analytic science, 
 has less need of an abundant stock of language, of 
 sounds and of numbers, in order to reach the highest 
 achievements. The child has the advantage of not 
 being able to turn away from the actual that directly 
 surrounds him as he might through overculture in 
 the use of abstractions be turned either by too fre- 
 quent naming of the same thing with different words, 
 or by too subtile distinctions between similar concepts 
 until instruction, especially in grammar, forces him 
 to it. Even after the child has gradually learned to 
 decline and conjugate, and is beginning to master 
 syntax, language serves him rather for the expression 
 of his own experiences, the communication of them 
 to others, particularly to those of His own age, than 
 
130 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 for the conscious formation of higher concepts. All 
 that he learns of these higher concepts is impressed 
 upon him by adults, or at any rate by older brothers 
 and sisters and relatives he is inoculated with it as 
 with foreign matter. 
 
 If it were not that the right time is far too rarely 
 considered, no great objection could be made to the 
 
 I substitution of learning through the tuition of others 
 in place of the predominant self-tuition in childhood. 
 For there comes a time, after speech has been acquired, 
 when the higher ideas of God, immortality, freedom, 
 eternity, the everlasting, nothing, death, and, further, 
 of duty, responsibility, self-control, virtue, and many 
 others, must be taught to the child. Unfortunately, 
 however, the beginning is made too soon with every- 
 thing, at least in most families, so that the word comes 
 before the possibility of understanding at all the idea 
 associated with it. The best way, undoubtedly, of 
 teaching a studious boy methods, and all the difficult 
 abstract matters that are in every science indispensa- 
 ble for progressive development, is to proceed genet- 
 
 1 ically by describing to him how the first discoverers 
 and inventors arrived at them. 
 
 Herein consists the truly reformatory service of the 
 much misunderstood Froebel that he allowed chil- 
 dren themselves to invent and discover ; that by edu- 
 cation, or rather by his educational instruction through 
 work, he brought to an independent unfolding, even 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 131 
 
 in early youth, the original, and therefore hereditary, 
 good talents of the little ones, but would not listen to 
 the claims of the method of presenting the abstract 
 prematurely. 
 
 Hence the genial originator of the plan of the new 
 German school, Hugo Goring, is perfectly right when 
 he desires that the child, in his first school instruction, 
 shall not first learn what has been learned by others, 
 but shall be led to understand what he has himself 
 experienced. 
 
 By this course the pleasure in learning is far A. 
 greater than in the ordinary doctrinaire or dogmatic 
 course, and that which is learned is impressed upon 
 the mind much more permanently. Eor myself, I am 
 absolutely incapable of fixing in my memory a series 
 of words devoid of meaning, jumbled together ; and I 
 could never in my youth retain the witch's multipli- 
 cation table in Goethe's Faust, although I very easily 
 learned by heart ballads and other connected poems, 
 and easily kept in my memory dates and places. In 
 fact, it was never possible for me to retain for a longer 
 time than a few minutes twenty words put together 
 arbitrarily without meaning. And yet we require a 
 child to do this when he learns phrases and vocables 
 the meaning of which he does not understand. Why 
 we do it is not to be discerned, for the only alleged 
 motive viz., that children must learn much merely to 
 forget it afterward will not be accepted seriously by a 
 
132 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 true friend of the young. Children learn of themselves, 
 by imitation, far too much that they have to forget. 
 
 The process, which is certainly a purely psychical 
 one, of the formation of concepts may be brought a 
 little nearer to our understanding from the physiolog- 
 ical point of view by the consideration that all con- 
 cepts, even the highest, ultimately come to exist only 
 after a great many sense-impressions have been re- 
 ceived. These impressions, taking effect especially 
 through the eye and the ear, but also, particularly in 
 childhood, through the sensory nerves in the finger- 
 tips, the lips, and the tongue, will naturally very fre- 
 quently cause excitement of the same nerve paths, 
 along with the same central portions of the brain, 
 because they agree with one another. For example, 
 far more tones from the third octave and the fourth 
 octave will set into activity the extremities of the au- 
 ditory nerves in the inner ear than from anywhere 
 else in the range of tone, in hearing either spoken 
 words or any kind of music. The lowest and the 
 highest tones are therefore not audible at all to many 
 people for lack of practice. So, too, with the light 
 that is of medium wave-length, with the temperatures 
 that lie about equally distant from the highest en- 
 durable degrees of heat or of cold : For the reason 
 that such a medium stratum of sense-impressions in 
 the scale of sensations in every department of sense is 
 from the moment of birth employed more frequently 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 133 
 
 than the other strata, there comes an adaptation of 
 the whole nerve mechanism to it. The nerve fibers 
 that by means of it come first into activity as the 
 leading ones respond more and more readily, and 
 probably offer less resistance to the stimulus that has 
 often before been felt, and is therefore not new ; so 
 that in the central portion also the ruts are, as it 
 were, easier to travel in. The connections of different 
 impressions with one another e. g., of tactile with 
 visual impressions in seizing objects, of auditory with 
 visual in the tearing of paper, of tactile with auditory 
 in the clapping of hands, of taste and feeling in the 
 sucking of milk presuppose organic association-paths 
 in the brain. And whether these are located in the 
 portion called by Charcot the carrefour sensitif^ or in 
 a different tract, or in several places, it must be re- 
 garded as extremely probable that, in case of strong 
 excitement of a sense-center, there will be produced 
 an accompanying excitement of the one that has very 
 often been excited along with it through an external 
 impression which, while it was single, yet distributed 
 itself between two senses. 
 
 This view supplies a physiological basis for the 
 old law of the association of ideas, and we can well 
 conceive that when one of the very numerous, extraor- 
 dinarily thin, connecting fibers and protoplasmatic 
 plexuses in the cerebral cortex becomes impassable in 
 
 advanced age, the memory weakens ; a memory-image 
 11 
 
134: DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 emerges, and the fellow of it no more presents itself. 
 A new sense-impression then remains isolated, or 
 awakens, through accompanying excitement, only 
 such memory-images as have from the days of youth 
 been impressed with special strength, the rest being 
 too quickly obliterated, and no more coming to real- 
 ization in the dulled visual or auditory or other sen- 
 sory sphere. It must be assumed that these spheres 
 in age, whether through deficient nutrition or through 
 decrease of the plasticity of their protoplasm, grad- 
 ually become less capable of their function, or waste 
 away through consumption of the protoplasm, where- 
 as in childhood the case is exactly reversed the 
 spheres are not yet capable of functioning on account 
 of incomplete development, lack of material for form- 
 ing tissue, and, in particular, lack of impressions to be 
 realized by them, which, as we know, can not reach 
 them until after the first month of life. The num- 
 ber and variety of the impressions is doubtless in the 
 external world the same in earliest youth as in ex- 
 treme age, but in both the capacity of the cerebral 
 substance to realize them is far less than in middle 
 age. The child can not yet form concepts out of 
 them ; the aged man can no longer do it. The latter 
 is " grown childish " because his cerebral cortex, like 
 that of the child, does not perform its function. 
 
 There is a very remarkable agreement in regard to 
 the beginning of the formation of concepts, one which 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 135 
 
 will probably be confirmed without exception in every 
 family on the globe, if we take the trouble to examine 
 more closely the behavior of the newborn, and of in- 
 fants among savages. This is the identity of the first 
 ideas formed by children in general. There has long 
 been a lively dispute as to the possibility of so-called 
 innate ideas. The question now takes a different 
 turn, for, beyond a doubt, no mental representation 
 can be inborn in any human being. The representa- 
 tion, or idea, can not arise before perceptions exist 
 i. e., before sense-impressions of various kinds have 
 been co-ordinated in time and space. And even after 
 the attainment of this first stage of activity of intel- 
 lect, a further step is still necessary, as I have shown, 
 for the formation of an idea, viz., the seeking out of 
 the cause of that which is perceived. Now, all this 
 can not be done by a newborn child. He is not yet 
 capable of perceiving anything. But if we consider 
 that all newly born children pass the first period of 
 life under very similar circumstances that they sleep, 
 during the greater part of the twenty-four hours of 
 the day, that they devote a large portion of the day 
 to the taking of milk, and that they let the remainder 
 of their waking time go by passively while they are 
 being washed, clothed, and taken care of then we 
 see plainly that the first sensations, and the percep- 
 tions that go with them, must be very similar in all 
 children must, in fact, be identical. The thing in 
 
136 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 which the intellectual life of the first few days, and 
 even weeks, centers, as far more important than any- 
 thing else, is nourishment, food ; or rather, to speak 
 from the child's point of view, that which removes the 
 disagreeable feeling of hunger and thirst (p. 18), and 
 produces the pleasurable feeling of sweetness, of suck- 
 ing, of moderate warmth, in the mouth. We can not, 
 however, incline to call this most important thing, 
 viz., the idea of milk, an innate idea ; we might much 
 better call it hereditary. But this expression would 
 not be quite correct, for there is nothing innate here 
 but the tendency and capacity to form such a product 
 of thought. The sensibility is innate, and this is 
 hereditary; innate, also, is the intellect, which very 
 early associates the milk with the removal of the hun- 
 ger, without associating it in the least with its indis- 
 pensable value as food. The intellect, too, may be 
 called hereditary, but its functions are always de- 
 pendent on external impressions ; and it is only be- 
 cause these agree in all children in the first period of 
 life that some of its activities appear to be innate. 
 The case is similar to that of the inheritance of teeth, 
 of the beard, and the color of the hair, and even the 
 color of the iris. The teeth are very often found to 
 be of such form and arrangement in children as in the 
 parents and grandparents, although the teeth are not 
 innate, but only their potentiality. The form and 
 color of the beard are very frequently hereditary, but 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 137 
 
 a full beard is never innate. Almost all children 
 come into the world with blue eyes, while brown, 
 gray, and greenish eyes are not seldom hereditary. It 
 is much the same in the intellectual sphere. The 
 tendencies which, along with the sensibility, like 
 germs in the seed-corn, are in the strict sense of the 
 word inborn, lead to perceptions and ideas which are 
 not in the least inborn, but which must be called 
 hereditary because they come forth out of these tend- 
 encies just as necessarily as the teeth and hair come 
 forth out of their inherited tendencies. 
 
 It has often been overlooked that in animate na- 
 ture, as well as in inanimate, the necessity of an event 
 is inevitable if the requisite conditions are fulfilled. 
 Just as little as a metal can contract while it is 
 heated, just as little as it can expand while it is cool- 
 ing, so little can an inborn tendency remain undevel- 
 oped when the external conditions of development are 
 given. Intellectual tendencies, talents, genius, inher- 
 ited good qualities of character, must unfold them- 
 selves when the conditions of development in general 
 are given, as surely as a rightly constructed clock that 
 has been properly wound, and has had its pendulum 
 put properly to swinging, must move its hands. The 
 notion of Lichtenberg, that a man should not say " I 
 think," but " It thinks in me," has special force for 
 the first stages of thinking in the child ; it must think 
 in him. In consequence of external impressions act- 
 
138 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 ing always in the same way during countless genera- 
 tions in the human race, and even in the mammals, 
 in the very first period of life, the child has in every 
 instance adjusted his brain to the same way of re- 
 ceiving nourishment through milk, and to what goes 
 along with that ; and hence it can not seem strange 
 that all human children in their very first period of 
 life think precisely the same thing, and are not distin- 
 guished from one another by any kind of "ideas." 
 At most they show differences in regard to the par- 
 ticular times, the dates, at which the divergence of 
 their natural predispositions appears. But these dif- 
 ferences are very slight in comparison with the vast 
 difference in the opinions, knowledge, qualities of 
 character and passions, of adult men and women. 
 
 A differentiation is effected in the intellectual 
 sphere, particularly during the learning-time of the 
 boy and the girl, which resembles in many respects 
 the differentiation of growing forms in the animal 
 and the vegetable kingdom. This I have already in- 
 dicated with reference to another matter, at the end 
 of the fifth chapter. The similarity of eggs or germs 
 is often so great that nobody can discover the least 
 difference by observation, no matter how searching 
 the microscopic, physical, or chemical examination ; 
 and yet in the course of development the variation of 
 the forms becomes plainly visible and can be discerned 
 without special means of investigation. Nay, more : 
 
THE FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 139 
 
 in the early stages of development of the egg of the 
 animal, during the segmentation of it, the products of 
 segmentation, the formative cells, which come into 
 existence through the segmentation, often resemble 
 one another so much that nobody can tell by looking 
 at them what they will soon become, and it is all the 
 same whether we are dealing with a sensory organ, 
 a motor organ, respiratory apparatus, or nutritive, etc. 
 All is at first apparently quite homogeneous at any 
 rate, undistinguishable by a human eye ; and yet every 
 part must be different from every other, different in 
 hereditary, indestructible qualities, otherwise there 
 could not proceed from it, in the comparatively short 
 term of the progressive development of the egg, the 
 wide variation of all the internal and external por- 
 tions of the growing organism. 
 
 Very much the same is it with the mental activity 
 of the child. In the beginning the mental germ (one 
 might speak figuratively of a mental egg) is for the 
 observer homogeneous in its various parts, and in it 
 the various directions of the coming development are 
 not yet discernible. Soon, however, these come plain- 
 ly forth, when the higher activity of the senses has 
 progressed from; general feeling to a separation of the 
 special sensations and to perception. But even at this 
 stage all children resemble one another, for the rea- 
 son that in all of them this first intellectual differen- 
 tiation has been going on in the same way for count- 
 
140 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 less generations. A stability, or faculty of persist- 
 ence, comparable to inertia in the inorganic world, to 
 which we give the name heredity, is so pronounced, 
 that the extremely insignificant variations in the en- 
 vironment of newborn human beings can make no 
 further change in them. These variations do not 
 produce their effect until the period of later child- 
 hood and youth ; then with them the means of educa- 
 tion co-operate to modify the condition and character 
 of the human being. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 THE relation of consciousness to self -conscious- 
 ness has had so much thought expended upon it for 
 centuries, while yet so little has become generally ac- 
 cepted concerning it, that one can not help wonder- 
 ing when he sees that the only way that can lead to 
 the settlement of the differences of opinion is almost 
 entirely neglected. This way is the accurate observa- 
 tion of the child at the critical period when he prop- 
 erly discovers himself, distinguishes himself from 
 other bodies living and inanimate. But what is the 
 meaning of " he " and " himself " when thus used ? Is 
 there not in the mere juxtaposition of these two pro- 
 nouns, both of which indicate the same being, viz., 
 the child, an assumption without proof? What can 
 we mean when we ask the question, " At what time 
 does the child distinguish himself from other persons, 
 and how does he come to make this distinction?" 
 What is it, then, that distinguishes? and what is it 
 that is distinguished ? 
 
142 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 Evidently we must advance here step by step from 
 the first phase in the child's life when there is no " I," 
 paying especial heed to the behavior of the child in 
 his perception of the members of his own body and 
 his perception of foreign objects seized by him. 
 There is not the least reason for assuming in advance 
 that every human being comes into the world en- 
 dowed with complete consciousness of self. Still less 
 can we adopt the old view (now, happily, an anti- 
 quated one), that at the moment of birth an immor- 
 tal soul is in waiting, as it were, for the new and as 
 yet unconscious citizen of the world in order to take 
 possession of him forever. The tiresome disputes of 
 the lawyers as to the time at which a human being 
 may properly be regarded as a particular individual 
 are just as fruitless for the question in hand as are the 
 speculations of earlier and, for that matter, not yet 
 quite extinct philosophers concerning the absolute 
 permanence of the soul as a being independent of its 
 receptacle, the body, or at any rate separate from it. 
 Impartial physiological investigation shows even in 
 the adult, beyond refutation, a persistent dependence 
 of every mental activity, not excepting the highest, 
 upon the nervous system, and in particular upon the 
 cerebral cortex. If the cortex is injured, the mental 
 activity can not remain normal. But a lowering of 
 this activity, extending so far as to complete extinc- 
 tion of what we call mind, takes place when the brain 
 
DEVELOPMENT OP SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 143 
 
 is free from injury, during dreamless sleep and during 
 the chloroform narcosis. And any one who, in order 
 to save the uninterrupted continuance of the con- 
 sciousness of self, goes so far as to deny the possibility 
 of absolutely dreamless sleep, or of a swoon involving 
 complete insensibility, will always have to remain a 
 debtor for the proof of his assertion. 
 
 Now, if neither the uninterrupted continuance of 
 conscious mental activity in sleep nor its independ- 
 ence of very finely organized tissues can be proved, 
 while such a continuity seems rather to be wanting in 
 the case of insane and hypnotized persons, then, tak- 
 ing our stand upon experience, we must question 
 also the unity of this mental activity. Even if we 
 had not the great number of observations we possess 
 concerning a manifold consciousness, a double ego, an 
 exchange of personality in hypnotized persons and in 
 certain hysteric women and men, who can by no means 
 be classed as insane or if these observations turned 
 out to be an incomprehensible series of errors-^-still 
 conscientious observation of the little child would 
 alone suffice to prove that the dogma, developed out 
 of presumption and overestimate of self, of the im- 
 mutability of the consciousness of self is absolutely 
 irreconcilable with the facts. 
 
 This is shown by the answer that must be made to 
 the questions that are first of all to be answered. 
 How does the child come, in general, to the conscious- 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 ness of himself ? Through what means does he dis- 
 tinguish himself from others ? At this point I must 
 call attention to something which appears to have 
 been hitherto wholly overlooked, the behavior of all 
 little children toward the parts of their own body. 
 In the child who is born with all his senses, each sense 
 contributes more or less toward the distinction of his 
 own bodily members from other persons and from ob- 
 jects without life. The eye sees the arms, the hands, 
 and the fingers, which can not as yet be counted, the 
 legs, knees, feet, and the still less countable toes all 
 of which move. These parts are all plainly seen 
 whenever anything definite comes forth in the field of 
 vision which at the beginning is made up only of 
 vague areas, running into one another, light and dark, 
 colored and colorless and when accommodation, i. e., 
 the ability to see objects at unequal distances with 
 equal distinctness, becomes active. Then the child's 
 eye sees also the breast and the abdomen, as well as 
 the lateral portions of the trunk, the hips, much more 
 seldom the shoulders, never the back, and of the head 
 nothing, unless it may be the tip of the nose, in shut- 
 ting an eye. The perception of the image in the mir- 
 
 
 ror belongs to a later period. 
 
 But the clothes that cover the skin, which is visi- 
 ble in the bath and in bed, are likewise seen ; and the 
 retinal images of them must, since these objects un- 
 dergo few alterations in the first year of life, impress 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 145 
 
 themselves as firmly as do the parts of the body, which 
 remain almost unchanged in appearance, except that 
 they are sometimes red, often pale, but always mobile 
 and moved together with the clothes. Each separate 
 part, of course, can only very slowly be impressed 
 upon the memory through the sense of sight, along 
 with the gradual development of the visual sphere; 
 for as late as the thirteenth, the fourteenth, even the 
 nineteenth month, and, in fact, toward the end of the 
 second year, I have myself repeatedly perceived that 
 in children perfectly sound and well developed their 
 own arm appears to them something entirely foreign. 
 In the fourteenth month a child bit himself in the 
 upper arm, after having looked at it a while, standing 
 up in his bed and holding by the railing with both 
 hands, so that the marks of the teeth remained visi- 
 ble for a long time after, and he suffered pain from 
 the bite. All children, it is likely, bite themselves 
 now and then in the fingers, try sometimes in a pas- 
 sion to pull them out, or at any rate they pull with 
 one hand the fingers of the other so vigorously that 
 their movements scarcely admit of any other interpre- 
 tation than that they want to get the fingers off ; and 
 it is much the same with the feet and toes. Little 
 children like to get their toes to the mouth and to 
 amuse themselves with these as with playthings, offer- 
 ing a biscuit to the feet as if these could share in the 
 eating of it. Chickens when quite young peck at the 
 
146 DEVELOPMENT OP MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 nails of their own toes as at grains of millet, and at 
 inkspots on the table. Sometimes a child tries to get 
 the whole foot loose from the leg when some one says 
 to him, " Give me your foot " (for the purpose of put- 
 ting the child's shoe or stocking on him). Here be- 
 longs also the careful looking at the hands and finger- 
 tips in the seventeenth to the twentieth week, before 
 the child's attempts to grasp objects are perfected. 
 When a grasp at the object has failed, children ob- 
 serve their hands, and when they have succeeded in 
 grasping a thing they are fond of looking alternately 
 at the object and at their hands. In the same man- 
 ner, when by chance both hands have come in con- 
 tact with each other in the numerous aimless move- 
 ments of the arms, the fingers are scrutinized. 
 
 Thus the sense of sight combines with the sense of 
 touch in the acquirement of knowledge of the parts 
 of the body, from the second year on. The sense of 
 touch, however, by itself furnishes much material in 
 this direction ; for when the child touches his own 
 skin in the dark, or with his eyes shut, he always has 
 two sensations of contact, that of the finger touching 
 and that of the place touched ; on the contrary, when 
 he touches any object not a part of himself, he has 
 only the sensation of the part that touches. When 
 this difference is frequently repeated, as is the case 
 with every child without exception, then it must be- 
 come by degrees more and more clear. Moreover, the 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 147 
 
 child learns in this way to distinguish from one an- 
 other the various forms of the separate parts of his 
 body ; e. g., the roundness of the chin and the flat- 
 ness of the breast. The great mobility of the toes 
 and the slight mobility of the trunk are felt. Fur- 
 ther, there comes the distinction of unlike tempera- 
 tures of different places. If the hand goes to the 
 breast, it feels less warm than when it lies on the 
 abdomen ; in the mouth the fingers feel warmer than 
 on the feet, on the forehead cooler than on the 
 shoulder. Then is noticed the unequal hardness of 
 the different places on the body. The hand coming 
 in contact with the head, it experiences greater resist- 
 ance than when it is laid on the stomach. 
 
 Through distinctions of this sort in the domain of 
 the sense of touch and of temperature, the body, which 
 has been felt of daily for many months, which at the 
 beginning naturally seemed to the tactual sphere 
 something just as foreign as any object whatever that 
 could be felt, that was warm or cold, hard or soft 
 this body must gradually have less of the charm of 
 novelty, and must therefore lose in interest. Thus 
 the child becomes by degrees accustomed to the per- 
 ception of the parts of his own body, and so to him- 
 self, in contrast with the strange, the new, the con- 
 tinually changing. 
 
 In this process two different departments of sense 
 are already taking part in the formation of the I-feel- 
 
148 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 ing (or feeling of selfhood). Not by any means that 
 they necessarily work together from the start, since 
 even children born blind get the same experiences of 
 themselves through the sense of touch that seeing 
 children do. The seeing ego is by a wide margin in- 
 dependent of the feeling eyo. The hearing ego is yet 
 to come. For every child, after some time, when it 
 babbles and screams, when it laughs and shouts, and 
 in particular when it tries to imitate sounds heard, 
 hears with special satisfaction its own voice. And 
 that this voice must make a different impression on 
 his brain, must be turned to different account, be 
 realized, in the child's auditory sphere, differently 
 from any noise not made by himself or any series 
 of sounds coming from without of this there can 
 not be a doubt. Another important thing is the 
 frequent production of noises and sounds by the 
 child's hands when he strikes them against his body, 
 when he claps his hands, and when he uses foreign 
 objects to make a din, as he often does with intoler- 
 able persistency. Every careful observer may perceive 
 that the attention of the child is always strained in a 
 peculiar manner when he himself is the cause of a 
 phenomenon that produces noise. It affords much 
 greater pleasure to every little child to sound any in- 
 strument himself, a toy trumpet or drum, than to 
 hear other persons " make music " with it ; and he 
 would rather make a splash in the water than to hear 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 149 
 
 others do it. As soon as this point is reached the 
 development of the consciously hearing ego is per- 
 fected. But we must bear in mind that this ego may 
 develop quite independently of the seeing and feeling 
 ego ; for children born totally deaf have nothing of it, 
 and yet their visual and tactual spheres are none the 
 worse for the deficiency, but rather appear to be only 
 the more acutely developed. 
 
 How it may be with the part played by the senses 
 of smell and of taste in the development of self-con- 
 sciousness, it is hard to say; for while both these 
 senses, the most subjective of all, become active very 
 early, it can not be perceived so plainly how far 
 through them through the realization, therefore, of 
 the olfactory and gustatory impressions in the olfac- 
 tory and gustatory spheres in the brain the child's 
 body is distinguished by him from other things. No 
 doubt to the little child, as to the adult, the smell of 
 his own skin, and of his clothing, is for the most part 
 less disagreeable than that of another's skin and cloth- 
 ing ; and there may be developed quite early in the 
 babe, who commonly smells of sour milk, by means 
 of olfactory impressions not suited to him (of tobacco, 
 for example), a strong dislike of strangers. But the 
 sense of smell leads so little to specific self-considera- 
 tion that it can hardly contribute much to the devel- 
 opment of self-consciousness. 
 
 The sense of taste may be of more importance in 
 
150 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 this respect, since it introduces in the yery earliest 
 period of life the most agreeable sensations on the one 
 hand (the sweet), and on the other hand extremely 
 disagreeable ones (in the taking of bitter medicines). 
 Of all general sensations, however, it is precisely dis- 
 agreeable feeling, pain most of all, that is the most 
 influential teacher in the distinguishing of the child's 
 ego from other things, as I have already remarked. 
 When the finger smarts after being put into the flame 
 of a candle, as the arm does after a bite, it will not 
 soon be put into the flame again ; and the biting of 
 the fingers very soon comes to a stop on account of 
 the painful effect that follows ; whereas the child likes 
 to put the fingers of other persons, and objects of 
 similar shape, into his mouth and to bite, even long 
 before his teeth come, and he continues for a long 
 time to grind his first teeth, which are to him a new 
 plaything. He has not yet discovered with regard to 
 all the parts belonging to his organism the difference 
 between them and that which does not belong to him. 
 When he has once apprehended this distinction, after 
 having become accustomed to his own skin, his own 
 limbs, he holds it fast for all the rest of his life at 
 least so long as his higher cerebral activity continues 
 normal. In certain mental disorders, to be sure, the 
 I-feeling (or feeling of selfhood), so toilsomely ac- 
 quired through self-investigation, through pain and 
 pleasure, through comparison of the experiences of all 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 151 
 
 the five departments of sense with one another, may 
 be lost or become perverted, as is proved by the fre- 
 quent self-mutilations of the insane. 
 
 One more factor remains to be considered in re- 
 gard to the development of the consciousness of self, 
 and one of essential importance. This is the connec- 
 tion of the higher nervous centers in the- brain with 
 the lower ones in the spinal marrow by means of the 
 cervical marrow. Those animals only that possess a 
 centralized nervous system have, in. general, self -con- 
 sciousness. Where this system is wanting, conscious- 
 ness indeed may exist, but not self-consciousness ; and 
 where it is developed, we have, according to all the 
 results of good investigations of experimental physiol- 
 ogists, not only the right but the duty also to dis- 
 tinguish various degrees of consciousness according to 
 the seat of the motor impulses. Just as I have pre- 
 viously characterized the consciousness of the person 
 seeing as not necessarily identical with the conscious- 
 ness of the person hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, 
 so we must separate the consciousness of the spinal 
 marrow, or of the cervical marrow, from the cortical 
 consciousness of the cerebral hemispheres, that is to say, 
 the proper higher ego or I. It has long been known 
 that the tail of a squirrel, even after complete sepa- 
 ration from the body of the animal, curls on receiving 
 impressions producing pain, and makes adaptive 
 movements as if the whole creature were there. So 
 
152 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 in the case of eels without heads, of frogs and other 
 amphibia without brain, and even of mammals after 
 excision of the entire brain, numerous observers have 
 established the fact of movements adaptive in a very 
 high degree. I have myself seen in newborn mam- 
 mals with no heads exactly the same sorts of move- 
 ment as in animals not deformed, and have seen a hu- 
 man child, born without brain, cry and suck and make 
 movements just like a normal child. It even showed 
 the same mimical gustatory reflexes as the normal 
 child, and must therefore, like that, have been capa- 
 ble of feeling. From this it follows that in normal 
 children at the beginning of life the chief seat of self- 
 consciousness, the cerebral cortex, is not necessary for 
 the totality of their movements. The newborn hu- 
 man being appears to be only scantily developed. 
 He is really ^o-less, and all he can do is, without will 
 or thought, to let his lower centers, in the cervical and 
 the spinal marrow, operate. The newborn child must 
 therefore be called irrational. He becomes a self- 
 conscious being very slowly, during the development 
 of his cerebrum. But even in the highest stage of 
 development, in the years of complete maturity, the 
 activity of the lower centers of consciousness can not 
 be discontinued, because the brain is not able of it- 
 self to direct all the phenomena of the body that de- 
 pend on the central nervous system, the processes of 
 nutrition and excretion, of respiration and heart- activ- 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 153 
 
 ity, of generation of warmth, of growth, etc.; all these 
 functions, rather, go on better without deliberation, 
 without will in fact, for the most part without con- 
 scious sensation because in undisturbed regularity. 
 But they continue through life to be dependent on 
 the spinal and cervical marrow. Not until certain 
 bounds that separate perfect health from disordered 
 states are passed does the cerebral consciousness learn 
 of the disturbance. And when this happens, most 
 persons are not able to describe accurately the loca- 
 tion and character of the pain ; e. g., in oppression, 
 colic, stitch in the side, cardialgia. Inasmuch as the 
 messages sent by the spinal marrow and the periph- 
 eral nerves to the brain from these parts are seldom 
 acutely discriminated and the same is true of the 
 painful feelings the cerebral ego is not well informed ; 
 whereas in judging of changes in the field of vision, 
 in hearing new words and melodies, and even in feel- 
 ing new objects cold or warm, an account is far more 
 easily given. 
 
 In this difficult question concerning the develop- 
 ment of the self-consciousness of the ego of the cere- 
 bral cortex, we must ever bear in mind that this ego 
 can not possibly be anything unitary, like the concept 
 of the ego gained through pure abstraction, but, in 
 proportion always to the prominence of activity of the 
 one or the other sensory sphere, is impressed more 
 strongly now in this direction, now in that. The dog 
 
154 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 has a stronger olfactory consciousness, the vulture a 
 stronger visual consciousness, than has man. But by 
 way of compensation man enjoys a property of his 
 central consciousness that belongs to no animal in the 
 same degree, and which first makes him properly man, 
 a responsible being : I mean the regulative activity of 
 the brain. For the reason that the collective sense- 
 impressions, in proportion always to their serviceable- 
 ness for the unfolding of intellectual life, gradually 
 lead to ideas, which in their relations with one another 
 now opposing, now supplementing one another 
 give rise to the voluntary movements, it becomes pos- 
 sible for man to shape his movements in general to 
 correspond to the demands the world makes upon him, 
 that is, to master it and thereby to act rationally. 
 
 To develop in the child (who, as has been said, 
 utterly lacks it in the first period of his existence) this 
 eminent property of man to do this systematically, 
 with constant reference to physiological considera- 
 tions, is under all circumstances one of the highest 
 problems a human being can propose to himself. 
 Only when the consciousness of self has reached such 
 a development that the child knows what he does and 
 what he does not do, can he be made clearly conscious 
 of responsibility for his actions, and so for the conse- 
 quences of the thing done or not' done. Then, out of 
 knowledge (science) is developed his conscience. But 
 to follow out these phases of mental development in 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 155 
 
 the child would carry us too far at present. That be- 
 longs to the theory of education. I prefer, in closing, 
 to sum up briefly the principal results of the consider- 
 ations presented in this chapter. 
 
 There are several grades of consciousness, lower 
 and higher, which have different seats in the higher 
 animals, particularly in the spinal marrow, cervical 
 marrow, and brain. The highest grade, self-conscious- 
 ness so called, which does not necessarily imply a 
 strong self-esteem, has its seat in the gray substance 
 of the cerebral cortex. It is therefore properly called 
 the cortical ego. Its chief importance consists in its 
 regulation of the motor impulses issuing from the sen- 
 sory spheres of the brain. These impulses come ulti- 
 mately from sense-impressions which lead to ideas. It 
 is, however, by no means demonstrated that the sepa- 
 rate departments of sense necessarily produce, taken 
 together, a unitary ego. Eather does the changeable- 
 ness of character in most men, as compared with the 
 very great rarity of persons so headstrong as to be 
 immovable in all circumstances, argue a changeable- 
 ness in the highest, central, regulative, self-conscious, 
 mental activity. This can not, of course, be of the 
 least detriment to the importance of the moral per- 
 sonality, of responsibility and self-control ; for each 
 human being, each child, and each mother, has never 
 more than one conscience, and although the self -con- 
 sciousness, or I-consciousness of the tactual sphere, is 
 
156 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 doubtless not necessarily merged into a common ego 
 with that of the visual and that of the auditory sphere 
 and as well that of the olfactory, and finally that of 
 the gustatory sphere still the experiences of one de- 
 partment may easily keep pace with the experiences 
 of another, and these must in a clear intellect recipro- 
 cally correct and supplement one another. 
 
CHAPTEE X. 
 
 THE CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 THE foregoing exposition of some of the most im- 
 portant epochs in the mental development of the 
 child is much too brief in proportion to the difficulty 
 and the magnitude of the problem discussed ; but it 
 was not intended by any means to be an exhaustive 
 treatment of the subject, but rather to stimulate in- 
 dividual observation and reflection on the part of 
 others. And it serves to point out the ways and the 
 aims that are most important. 
 
 The fundamental condition of all mentality is ac- 
 tivity of the senses. Accordingly I began with the 
 gradual awakening of sense-activity in the newborn 
 human being, who comes into the world deaf and 
 mentally blind, mentally without feeling, in general 
 without mind, but rich, very rich in intellectual and 
 moral germs, tendencies, aptitudes, which he has in- 
 herited in lavish abundance from his ancestors. Next 
 were considered the sensations, which are gradually 
 separated from one another, and the special feelings 
 
158 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 that are differentiated out of general bodily feeling. 
 These it is which, on account of the pleasure and the 
 discomfort connected with them, chiefly determine the 
 first behavior of the infant, and, being dependent in 
 the first instance upon the excitability and impression- 
 ability of the nervous system, influence the develop- 
 ment of one or another temperament. 
 
 In regard to the first activity of the intellect, I 
 stated that it consists in the co-ordination of all the 
 possible sensations of the five senses (but not of the 
 feelings that affect only the organs themselves) in 
 time and space. A sensation of light or of sound, 
 of touch or of temperature, once cognized as coming 
 between two others in point of time, or as existing 
 in a certain locality, or as situated in a certain direc- 
 tion, is raised to a perception. But not until, with 
 further development of the understanding, a cause 
 is found for that which is perceived, is generated 
 the last and highest product of the understanding 
 in the stricter sense, the idea. This, on its part, 
 through its limitation to the concrete becomes a 
 sense-percept, and through abstraction of qualities 
 common to many ideas becomes a concept, i. e., a more 
 general idea. The combination and separation of 
 ideas constitutes the essence of thought. Every child 
 learns of himself to think, since every child brings 
 with him into the world, as every living thing does, 
 an ability to discriminate. Along with the capacity 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 159 
 
 for discriminating is given that of comparing; and 
 here is manifested the remarkable preference for unit- 
 ing the agreements of unlike things rather than sepa- 
 rating the differences of similar things, in the first 
 period of development. 
 
 It is in a quite different direction that the older 
 child, or rather his growing brain, enlarges his clear 
 ideas, ordering his original, aimless, often ill-adapted, 
 inborn, impulsive movements to accord with the mo- 
 tor ideas acquired through the perception of the more 
 rational movements of other persons. The reflex and 
 instinctive, as well as the original, inborn, hereditary, 
 impulsive movements, are by degrees repressed, and 
 in part controlled, as compared with the imitated 
 muscular movements, particularly those of the tongue, 
 the imitations of sounds. By means of continual re- 
 ciprocal action of the motor impulses that give the 
 child pleasurable feelings and abolish unpleasant feel- 
 ings the will emerges in its purity ; and the riddle, 
 how the perfectly will-less newborn creature becomes 
 in his second half year a being that evidently moves 
 voluntarily, appears somewhat less dark when we con- 
 sider that, unless clear ideas of the action to be per- 
 formed precede the action, no willing is at all possible. 
 The whole development and perfecting of the child's 
 will is manifested most plainly in the learning of 
 speech. Here the error of the old theory, that the 
 intellect has its origin in language, is demonstrated 
 
160 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 beyond denial. Just the reverse of that is true. Only 
 he who has already much intellect, more than any 
 brute has, can learn to speak; for articulate speech 
 requires two things: above all, hearing and under- 
 standing of what is spoken (or, in the case of one born 
 deaf, the perceiving of what is spoken through the 
 sense of sight or of touch) ; next, the expression of 
 one's own ideas by means of quite definite co-ordinated 
 muscular movements, together with the employment 
 of breathing, and in the great majority of nations, of 
 exhalation exclusively. 
 
 Taken altogether, it has been found that speech is 
 a higher development of pantomime. By means of a 
 great number of gestures and an extremely subtly de- 
 veloped play of feature, uninstructed deaf mutes un- 
 derstand each other at this day, just as in primeval 
 times, without doubt, did primeval men who were 
 ignorant of speech. And what we know in general 
 of the most ancient languages shows so great an agree- 
 ment in regard to the most important characteristics 
 of the language of children at the present time, that 
 we may say the human race as a whole has behind it 
 a course of development in this matter similar to that 
 which every normal child goes through in learning to 
 speak. Nor can it be doubted that the formation of 
 complex ideas, of higher concepts, therefore, which is 
 favored in such an extraordinary degree by the ac- 
 quirement of speech in the case of the child, was ad- 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 161 
 
 vanced and completed in like manner in the case of 
 the primitive man, and continues to be thus advanced 
 and completed in the savage of the present day. It is 
 not the knowledge of words that begets intellect and 
 facilitates thinking ; it is abundance of ideas, and 
 hence of thoughts, which grow out of the combination 
 and separation of the ideas generated by sensations 
 and perceptions. These ideas, however, must first be 
 sharply separated from one another before they be- 
 come available for abstractions of a higher sort and 
 for new combinations ; and the complete, sharp sepa- 
 ration is made possible only by means of exact desig- 
 nation, and thus by knowledge of words, consequently 
 by language. 
 
 It would, however (let me emphasize this point), 
 be quite preposterous to suppose that the childish in- 
 tellect may be screwed up beyond its ordinary tension 
 by pressing words into it as early and as long as pos- 
 sible, and that, too, in various languages; for it is 
 only when words designate things well understood 
 that they can have the value they have been shown to 
 have for the development of the intellect. But for 
 the brain of the child, which is at the beginning only 
 slightly developed, nothing is perfectly intelligible 
 except that which is easily perceived, sensuous, tangi- 
 ble, capable of being grasped in general, that is di- 
 rectly apprehensible by the senses not the abstract, 
 which in every case can only have its origin in some- 
 
162 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 thing perceived by the senses. For at the beginning 
 precisely those portions of the brain of which I spoke 
 the visual sphere, the auditory sphere, the tactual, 
 the gustatory, the olfactory spheres, and the areas of 
 the cerebral cortex associated with the voluntary 
 movements are either not at all or only very little 
 developed; and yet the brain weighs (according to 
 Vierordt), at the end of the first year of life, two and 
 a half times as much as at birth, and gains from that 
 time on through all the rest of life only about one 
 third more. 
 
 Through the light thrown by experimental physi- 
 ology, and by pathological anatomy and physiology of 
 the human brain, upon the connection of feeling, will- 
 ing, and thinking, and even certain peculiarities of 
 character, with the constitution of the superficies of 
 the cerebrum (in dogs), it has become possible to gain 
 an insight into the mechanism of the first learning. 
 
 Two fundamental rules are here to be kept in 
 mind by every mother, by every educator of little 
 children, continually; first, to spare the organs of 
 sense and the nervous system; second, to exercise 
 them. 
 
 In the matter of promoting or restricting the ca- 
 pacity that unfolds itself sooner or later, always 
 according to natural endowment of forming higher 
 concepts, it is in any case better to talk sensibly with 
 the child who is learning to talk than to attempt to 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 163 
 
 put one's self artificially into his intellectual condition 
 by using an artificial, childish language ; for this kind 
 of language will have to be unlearned later. And if, 
 for example, the parents, in speaking with the child, 
 do not use the pronoun " I," but call themselves 
 " papa " and " mamma," and address the child not in 
 the second person but by using his name in the third 
 person singular, then they make much harder for him 
 the correct use of the personal pronouns, and at the 
 same time the important distinction between mine 
 and thine. The point is, not at what time does the 
 so-much discussed abstract concept of the "I," the 
 self-consciousness, the being-myself, definitely appear, 
 but at what time does the correct naming of it begin. 
 
 The gradual development of the "I "-feeling in 
 the first and second years of life has been by me 
 ascribed to gradual distinction of the parts of one's 
 own body from other bodies. I called attention to 
 the fact, that although all children without exception 
 are in the first period of life egoists they have sympa- 
 thy, to be sure, and they share in the joy of others, 
 but are chiefly set upon the satisfaction of their own 
 hunger and thirst, upon securing agreeable conditions 
 for themselves yet they have no unitary conscious- \/ 
 ness of their self ; the fact is, rather, that the separate 
 sensory centers and motor centers are still in a strik- 
 ing manner independently active. 
 
 For the right fusion of the diiferent elements of 
 
164: DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 the manifold " I " of the child of the cervical con- 
 sciousness that exists at the very beginning preceding 
 respiration, for example, and of the spinal-marrow 
 consciousness, with the later appearing " I " that 
 feels, sees, hears and for the formation of an indi- 
 viduality with firm character and sensitive conscience, 
 heredity is often of still greater importance than edu- 
 cation. I desire to say this, at the close of these con- 
 siderations, with special emphasis. And yet I can 
 not agree with the great Darwin in the opinion that 
 the influence of education, as compared with that of 
 heredity, is infinitesimal. For precisely the most im- 
 portant function of the brain, the regulation of all 
 the bodily processes connected with it through the 
 nervous system, directly or indirectly, and of all ac- 
 tions, as well as the right division of time, can not be 
 attained, however superior may be the hereditary en- 
 dowments, without the most careful selection of that 
 which is presented to the sensuous perception in the 
 season of youth. It has long been known that the 
 development of this regulator depends directly upon 
 the impressions received in youth, and thus upon edu- 
 cation ; and a particularly instructive example of this 
 is furnished in the examination of the brain of the 
 blind, deaf, and dumb Laura Bridgman, who was born 
 in 1829 and died in 1889. At two years of age she 
 lost her left eye wholly, but retained a slight sensation 
 for large, bright objects with the right eye up to her 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 165 
 
 eighth year, at which time the right eye also became 
 entirely blind. The child of two years had lost her 
 speech completely along with her hearing ; her smell 
 and taste were partly gone. In this pitiable condition 
 the child was reared with the help of signs at first, 
 arbitrary signs of touch. She learned, among other 
 things, to sew and knit. But in the year 1837 she 
 was taken to an institute for the blind in Boston. 
 Here the girl was taught and trained by the superin- 
 tendent, Dr. S. Gr. Howe, with unspeakable patience. 
 The name of an object, printed in raised letters, was 
 pasted upon the object, and Laura was made to touch 
 the word, and then the object. Next she combined 
 the two tactile impressions. Then she learned to 
 form the name of the object out of the separate let- 
 ters, and finally, after a long time, she learned the in- 
 dividual letters. When she had made the important 
 discovery that "the sign for an object could be con- 
 structed from the individual letters, the meaning of 
 what she was doing dawned upon her. From this 
 time on she had to be held back in learning, lest her 
 health should be endangered." Although in her 
 eighth year the sense of smell was still entirely want- 
 ing, yet she could at a later period tell the direction 
 of the kitchen by the smell ; at this time she distin- 
 guished sour better than sweet or bitter. " Her sense 
 of touch and contact was very acute even for a blind 
 
 person, and she was very sensitive to jar. As far as 
 13 
 
166 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 could be discovered, she did not dream in visual or 
 auditory ideas. She had more than fifty sounds by 
 which she could designate acquaintances. She was, 
 moreover, remarkable for her sense of order, neatness, 
 and propriety." Through her sense of jar she could 
 recognize the footsteps, and sometimes even the voices, 
 of her acquaintances, her statement being that she 
 " heard through her feet." By the sense of smell she 
 could, in 1878, distinguish the odors of some more 
 fragrant flowers, but cologne- water, ammonia, and 
 onions only when quite strong. Bitter and acid she 
 tasted less well at this time than sweet and salt. Her 
 sense of touch was from twice to three times as acute 
 as that of a seeing person. I have myself seen the 
 facsimile of a letter quite neatly written by herself 
 without assistance. She composed little poems. " A 
 cane with knots on it was less pleasing to her than a 
 smooth one, and an irregular knobbed stick than one 
 with the prominences at regular intervals." 
 
 In the case of this person, who was deprived, ex- 
 cept during her earliest childhood, completely of sight 
 and hearing, partly of smell and taste, and was thus 
 almost a being with a single sense, yet very sensitive, 
 and who, in spite of all, owing to exceedingly careful 
 regimen, reached the age of sixty, the examination 
 of the brain showed that those portions which from 
 youth up could not be brought into activity in the 
 ordinary way through external impressions viz., all 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 167 
 
 the cerebral nerves were small ; the gustatory nerve, 
 the auditory nerve, and a nerve that moves the eye- 
 ball were stunted, particularly the tract of the optic 
 nerves. The hemispheres appeared somewhat flat- 
 tened behind, and the occipital lobe, in fact, smaller 
 on the right than on the left, and the right cuneus 
 much less developed than the left. This difference in 
 the region belonging to the visual spheres is intelligi- 
 ble when we consider that Miss Bridgman, from her 
 second year, was completely blind with her left eye, 
 whereas with the right she " retained some sensation 
 of light until her eighth year enough, at any rate, to 
 allow the development of the centers of the left side 
 to go on." Further, the insula was found abnormally 
 exposed in a manner corresponding essentially to the 
 variations from the norm that are characteristic for 
 deaf mutes [American Journal of Psychology, vol. 
 iii, No. 3, On the Brain of Laura Bridgman, Don- 
 aldson]. All these, and still other peculiarities of the 
 brain in this rare case, agree with the views presented 
 here before the peculiarities were known> and with 
 the results of experiments recently made by various 
 observers upon animals. For instance, if an eye is 
 removed from a newborn rabbit, the corresponding 
 portions of the brain are found to be stunted in the 
 adult animal. 
 
 Strong, then, as heredity is, powerful as its influ- 
 ence appears in the shaping of every organized being 
 
168 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 at every step, still the influence of external circum- 
 stances may surpass it in a psyche-genetic respect ; and 
 it is just here that is situated the center of gravity of 
 a natural, a physiological pedagogy. Such a peda- 
 gogy must work, first of all, among the countless he- 
 reditary tendencies by means of consistent, suitable 
 selection of auditory and visual impressions ; then by 
 all ways of regulating the movements, and later the 
 actions, must work in the direction of developing the 
 useful tendencies, those worthy of development, re- 
 ceived from innumerable ancestors, as fully and har- 
 moniously as possible ; and, on the other hand, those 
 tendencies that are harmful, often directly destructive 
 to the child himself and to the society in which he 
 grows up, must from the beginning be hindered in 
 their development, stifled, as it were, in the germ. This 
 is the meaning of the significant expression, " to bend 
 the will of the child," a thing that is best done in ac- 
 cordance with the above-mentioned principle of the 
 diversion of the attention. 
 
 But if in desperate cases, where the education of 
 the child seems to present insurmountable difficulties, 
 we choose to send him off at once to a reform school, 
 folding our hands in our lap and solacing ourselves 
 with the weak consolation that one can make no head- 
 way "against heredity," then we forego one of the 
 very greatest advantages ascertained by experience. 
 Precisely in the case of pronounced hereditary tend- 
 
CONDITIONS OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 169 
 
 encies has education one of the most rewarding prob- 
 lems to solve through favoring the good and oppos- 
 ing the bad. The child of a drunkard or of an 
 insane person may have most excellent qualities of 
 character, may be talented in a very high degree ; and 
 inasmuch as the time will never come when such 
 children will not be born, since no sharp boundary 
 line between insane and sane can be drawn, and 
 the marriage of persons of abnormal intellect can 
 not lawfully be prevented, and cerebral disorder, like 
 dipsomania, frequently does not manifest itself until 
 after marriage, we must reckon -with the existing 
 facts. And here it is that among sound children of 
 sound parents, also, in their education in the family, 
 far too much that is unphysiological is done, and far 
 too little that is physiologically necessary is done, in 
 order to preserve the intellectual health through a 
 correct dietetic of the brain. If this knowledge once 
 makes its way into wider circles, then young and in- 
 experienced mothers will of their own accord look 
 about for means of instructing themselves as to what 
 is needed for the education of their little darlings dur- 
 ing the first years of life, and will not intrust them so 
 much as has been the case to uneducated hired serv- 
 ants. 
 
 I am so often asked how, then, one must go to 
 work in order to prepare himself properly for the ob- 
 servation and the regulation of the intellectual devel- 
 
170 DEVELOPMENT OF MIND IN THE CHILD. 
 
 opment of the little child, that I can not refrain from 
 referring once more to the book mentioned at the be- 
 ginning The Mind of the Child [vols. vii and ix 
 of The International Education Series, D. Appleton 
 & Co., New York]. But a full exposition of its con- 
 tents would not be in place here. Let me rather close 
 with the wish that all parents who read that book 
 may be moved by it to take to heart more than they 
 have done not merely what a blessing and what a 
 transcendent source of happiness has come to them, 
 but also how great is their responsibility. 
 
SYLLABUS OF PREYER'S 
 MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. 
 
 Pages i to 15. 
 
 THE SENSES. 
 
 1. EACH sense essential in its own field of knowledge. 
 
 2. A sense not self-active in relation to knowledge. 
 
 3. The order of awakening of the several senses. 
 
 4. Differences between the infant's brain and that of 
 
 the adult. 
 
 5. Need of training the senses through acts of discrimi- 
 
 nation. 
 
 Pages 1 6 to 29. 
 
 FEELINGS, EMOTIONS, TEMPERAMENTS. 
 
 1. Bodily feelings not distinguished in early infancy. 
 
 2. Sense-perceptions giving rise to feelings. 
 
 3. The emotions and their development. 
 
 4. Educational influences of fear. 
 
 5. Early manifestation of general temperament. 
 
 6. Classification of temperaments. 
 
 7. Necessary differences in the treatment of children 
 
 having different temperaments. 
 
 Pages 30 to 47. 
 
 PERCEPTIONS AND IDEAS. 
 
 1. The first intellectual activity. 
 
 2. Close relation of the two senses of sight and touch 
 
 in the acquirement of early knowledge. 
 
I7 2 SYLLABUS OF PREYER'S 
 
 3. Progress of mental action from the field of mere sen- 
 sation to that of perception. 
 
 4. Further progress from the perception to the idea and 
 to thought. 
 
 5. Educational importance of the principle of "Divert- 
 ing the Attention." 
 
 6. The influence of play upon intellectual develop- 
 
 ment. 
 
 7. Its influence upon character. 
 
 8. Play to be permitted without undue restrictions. 
 
 Pages 48 to 65. 
 
 THE WILL. 
 
 1. The human will superior to material forces. 
 
 2. The determinant force in man's career and des- 
 
 tiny. 
 
 3. Will-action first evidenced by imitative movements. 
 
 4. Will dependent upon deliberative ideas arising from 
 
 perceptions and sensations. 
 
 5. Need of providing for suitable external impressions 
 
 and of guarding against pernicious influences. 
 
 6. Undue requirement or prohibition alike harmful to 
 
 the development of will. 
 
 7. Care of general health and of brain and nerve exer- 
 
 cise conducive to normal will-power. 
 
 8. Self-instruction precedes development under the di- 
 
 rection of other persons. 
 
 9. Evidences that sense-impressions rather than origi- 
 
 nal desires give rise to will-action. 
 
 10. Inhibition as the higher form of will-activity. 
 
 11. Harm of requiring too frequent or too severe exer- 
 
 cise of inhibition. 
 
MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. 1/3 
 
 Pages 66 to 83. 
 
 THE FIRST LEARNING. 
 
 1. The child's earliest acquirement of knowledge arises 
 
 from sense-perception, not from a teacher or 
 through language. 
 
 2. In direct contact with things, and especially in 
 
 reason and character are cultivated. 
 
 3. Thinking can not be taught through language, but 
 
 must arise from direct experience. 
 
 4. Wrong results of one-sided instruction either in lan- 
 
 guage or in observation. 
 
 5. Physiological view of the relation of special activities 
 
 to certain definite portions of the brain. 
 
 6. Importance of such education as shall call into action 
 
 all the powers of the mind. 
 
 7. The dangers of excessive book-work in the education 
 
 of children. 
 
 8. Discrimination and comparison are the elements of 
 
 an act of thinking. 
 
 Pages 84 to 102. 
 
 INTELLECT AND LANGUAGE. 
 
 1. Thought and the process of reasoning may be active 
 
 without the use of language. 
 
 2. Language aids the processes of mental development 
 
 through all steps and is essential to full mental ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 3. The learning of language is dependent upon right 
 
 brain condition and suitable influence of associates. 
 
 4. The child's observation of looks and gestures pre- 
 
 pares him for the reception of words as expressive 
 of ideas. 
 
1/4 SYLLABUS OF PREYER'S 
 
 Pages 103 to 122. 
 
 SPEECH. 
 
 1. The importance of trustworthy records of the early 
 
 speech of children. 
 
 2. Crying comes to possess some characteristic of lan- 
 
 guage in that it expresses discriminated impres- 
 sions. 
 
 3. Before the end of the first year of life articulate words 
 
 are commonly used intelligently. 
 
 4. The development of the speech center in the brain 
 
 during the process of learning to use language. 
 
 5. Successive steps in the physical and mental processes 
 
 in hearing and reproducing a given sound. 
 
 6. The association of special words with certain expe- 
 
 riences or observations, is the further essential to 
 language acquirement. 
 
 Pages 123 to 140. 
 
 FORMATION OF HIGHER IDEAS. 
 
 1. Words help the child first to more definite ideas, and 
 
 afterward to connected thought. 
 
 2. Memory along the line of more than one sense may 
 
 be associated with the idea expressed by a word. 
 
 3. Words, while few, are used as too comprehensive and 
 
 vague, because the ideas are not yet sharply defined 
 and distinguished. 
 
 4. Teaching by words is begun too early if the abstract 
 
 ideas can not be developed from the child's stock 
 of experiences. 
 
 5. Formation of clear concepts and strong association 
 
 of ideas require many sense-impressions. 
 
 6. Children are alike in their earliest thought-processes. 
 
MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. 175 
 Pages 141 to 156. 
 
 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 1. Consciousness of self is not present to the new-born 
 
 child. 
 
 2. The child's knowledge of himself comes severally 
 
 along the line of the different senses. 
 
 3. Sight and touch co-operate in the gaining of a knowl- 
 
 edge of the body and its belongings. 
 
 4. The sense of hearing gives later conceptions of self 
 
 as distinguished from external objects. 
 
 5. The senses of smell and taste can add comparatively 
 
 little to the conception of self. 
 
 6. Full self-consciousness requires the presence and ac- 
 
 tivity of a centralized nervous system. 
 
 7. The sensory consciousness of self can not reveal the 
 
 unit ego, which requires pure abstraction. 
 
 8. The power of self to regulate its own activity is the 
 
 highest province of self-consciousness. 
 
 9. Education involves the development of conscience 
 
 out of the knowledge of self and the idea of re- 
 sponsibility for self-activity. 
 
 Pages 157 to 170. 
 
 MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 1. Sense-activity is the essential condition to all further 
 
 mental action. 
 
 2. The first acts of intellect consist in relating sensa- 
 
 tions with reference to time or space. 
 
 3. The full idea as belonging to the understanding in- 
 
 volves the further relation of cause. 
 
 4. Thought consists in the combination of ideas or their 
 
 separation. 
 
1/6 MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. 
 
 5. The will is developed from the ideas of possible 
 
 movement and of repression of activities. 
 
 6. The perfecting of intellect and of will is manifested 
 
 in the learning of speech. 
 
 7. Only words that express things that are well under- 
 
 stood can have real value in mental development. 
 
 8. Right education requires that the senses and the 
 
 nervous system be exercised without being over- 
 taxed. 
 
 9. The formation of individuality and character depend 
 
 upon both heredity and education. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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