The Story of the Mind
by James Mark Baldwin · English · Gutenberg #20522 · 430,537 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of the Mind
Author: James Mark Baldwin
Release date: February 6, 2007 [eBook #20522]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE MIND ***
Produced by Curtis Weyant, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by Case Western Reserve University Preservation
Department Digital Library)
THE
STORY OF THE MIND
BY
JAMES MARK BALDWIN
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1902,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
* * * * *
PREFACE.
In this little book I have endeavoured to maintain the simplicity
which is the ideal of this series. It is more difficult, however, to
be simple in a topic which, even in its illustrations, demands of the
reader more or less facility in the exploration of his own mind. I am
persuaded that the attempt to make the matter of psychology more
elementary than is here done, would only result in making it untrue
and so in defeating its own object.
In preparing the book I have secured the right and welcomed the
opportunity to include certain more popular passages from earlier
books and articles. It is necessary to say this, for some people are
loath to see a man repeat himself. When one has once said a thing,
however, about as well as he can say it, there is no good reason that
he should be forced into the pretence of saying something different
simply to avoid using the same form of words a second time. The
question, of course, is as to whether he should not then resign
himself to keeping still, and letting others do the further speaking.
There is much to be said for such a course. But if one have the right
to print more severe and difficult things, and think he really has
something to say which would instruct the larger audience, it would
seem only fair to allow him to speak in the simpler way also, even
though all that he says may not have the merit of escaping the charge
of infringing his own copyrights!
I am indebted to the proprietors of the following magazines for the
use of such passages: The Popular Science Monthly, The Century
Magazine, The Inland Educator; and with them I also wish to thank The
Macmillan Company and the owners of Appletons' Universal Cyclopædia.
As to the scope and contents of the Story, I have aimed to include
enough statement of methods and results in each of the great
departments of psychological research to give the reader an
intelligent idea of what is being done, and to whet his appetite for
more detailed information. In the choice of materials I have relied
frankly on my own experience and in debatable matters given my own
opinions. This gives greater reality to the several topics, besides
making it possible, by this general statement, at once to acknowledge
it, and also to avoid discussion and citation of authorities in the
text. At the same time, in the exposition of general principles I have
endeavoured to keep well within the accepted truth and terminology of
psychology.
It will be remarked that in several passages the evolution theory is
adopted in its application to the mind. While this great theory can
not be discussed in these pages, yet I may say that, in my opinion,
the evidence in favour of it is about the same, and about as strong,
as in biology, where it is now made a presupposition of scientific
explanation. So far from being unwelcome, I find it in psychology no
less than in biology a great gain, both from the point of view of
scientific knowledge and from that of philosophical theory. Every
great law that is added to our store adds also to our conviction that
the universe is run through with Mind. Even so-called Chance, which
used to be the "bogie" behind Natural Selection, has now been found to
illustrate--in the law of Probabilities--the absence of Chance. As
Professor Pearson has said: "We recognise that our conception of
Chance is now utterly different from that of yore.... What we are to
understand by a chance distribution is one in accordance with law, and
one the nature of which can, for all practical purposes, be closely
predicted." If the universe be pregnant with purpose, as we all wish
to believe, why should not this purpose work itself out by an
evolution process under law?--and if under law, why not the law of
Probabilities? We who have our lives insured provide for our children
through our knowledge and use of this law; and our plans for their
welfare, in most of the affairs of life, are based upon the
recognition of it. Who will deny to the Great Purpose a similar
resource in producing the universe and in providing for us all?
I add in a concluding section on Literature some references to various
books in English, classified under the headings of the chapters of the
text. These works will further enlighten the reader, and, if he
persevere, possibly make a psychologist of him.
J. MARK BALDWIN.
PRINCETON, _April, 1898_.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND--PSYCHOLOGY
II. WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON--INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY
III. THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL--COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY
IV. THE MIND OF THE CHILD--CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
V. THE CONNECTION OF BODY WITH MIND--PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY--MENTAL
DISEASES
VI. HOW WE EXPERIMENT ON THE MIND--EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
VII. SUGGESTION AND HYPNOTISM
VIII. THE TRAINING OF THE MIND--EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
IX. THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY--SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
X. THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT
XI. LITERATURE
* * * * *
LIST OF DIAGRAMS.
FIGURE
1. Origin of instinct by organic selection
2. Reflex and voluntary circuits
3. Outer surface of the left hemisphere of the brain
4. Inner surface or the right hemisphere of the brain
5. The speech zone (after Collins)
6. Mouth-key
7. Apparatus for optical experiment
8. Memory curves
* * * * *
THE STORY OF THE MIND
CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND--PSYCHOLOGY,
Psychology is the science of the mind. It aims to find out all about
the mind--the whole story--just as the other sciences aim to find out
all about the subjects of which they treat--astronomy, of the stars;
geology, of the earth; physiology, of the body. And when we wish to
trace out the story of the mind, as psychology has done it, we find
that there are certain general truths with which we should first
acquaint ourselves; truths which the science has been a very long time
finding out, but which we can now realize without a great deal of
explanation. These general truths, we may say, are preliminary to the
story itself; they deal rather with the need of defining, first of
all, the subject or topic of which the story is to be told.
1. The first such truth is that the mind is not the possession of man
alone. Other creatures have minds. Psychology no longer confines
itself, as it formerly did, to the human soul, denying to the animals
a place in this highest of all the sciences. It finds itself unable to
require any test or evidence of the presence of mind which the animals
do not meet, nor does it find any place at which the story of the mind
can begin higher up than the very beginnings of life. For as soon as
we ask, "How much mind is necessary to start with?" we have to answer,
"Any mind at all"; and all the animals are possessed of some of the
actions which we associate with mind. Of course, the ascertainment of
the truth of this belongs--as the ascertainment of all the truths of
nature belongs--to scientific investigation itself. It is the
scientific man's rule not to assume anything except as he finds facts
to support the assumption. So we find a great department of psychology
devoted to just this question--i.e., of tracing mind in the animals
and in the child, and noting the stages of what is called its
"evolution" in the ascending scale of animal life, and its
"development" in the rapid growth which every child goes through in
the nursery. This gives us two chapters of the story of the mind.
Together they are called "Genetic Psychology," having two divisions,
"Animal or Comparative Psychology" and "Child Psychology."
2. Another general truth to note at the outset is this: that we are
able to get real knowledge about the mind. This may seem at first
sight a useless question to raise, seeing that our minds are, in the
thought of many, about the only things we are really sure of. But that
sort of sureness is not what science seeks. Every science requires
some means of investigation, some method of procedure, which is more
exact than the mere say-so of common sense; and which can be used over
and again by different investigators and under different conditions.
This gives a high degree of verification and control to the results
once obtained. The chemist has his acids, and reagents, and blowpipes,
etc.; they constitute his instruments, and by using them, under
certain constant rules, he keeps to a consistent method. So with the
physiologist; he has his microscope, his staining fluids, his means of
stimulating the tissues of the body, etc. The physicist also makes
much of his lenses, and membranes, and electrical batteries, and X-ray
apparatus. In like manner it is necessary that the psychologist should
have a recognised way of investigating the mind, which he can lay
before anybody saying: "There, you see my results, you can get them
for yourself by the same method that I used."
In fulfilling this requirement the psychologist resorts to two methods
of procedure. He is able to investigate the mind in two ways, which
are of such general application that anybody of sufficient training to
make scientific observations at all can repeat them and so confirm the
results. One of these is what is called Introspection. It consists in
taking note of one's own mind, as all sorts of changes are produced in
it, such as emotions, memories, associations of events now gone, etc.,
and describing everything that takes place. Other persons can repeat
the observations with their own minds, and see that what the first
reports is true. This results in a body of knowledge which is put
together and called "Introspective Psychology," and one chapter of the
story should be devoted to that.
Then the other way we have is that of experimenting on some one else's
mind. We can act on our friends and neighbours in various ways, making
them feel, think, accept, refuse this and that, and then observe how
they act. The differences in their action will show the differences in
the feelings, etc., which we have produced. In pursuing this method
the psychologist takes a person--called the "subject" or the
"re-agent"--into his laboratory, asks him to be willing to follow
certain directions carefully, such as holding an electric handle,
blowing into a tube, pushing a button, etc., when he feels, sees, or
hears certain things; this done with sufficient care, the results are
found recorded in certain ways which the psychologist has arranged
beforehand. This second way of proceeding gives results which are
gathered under the two headings "Experimental" and "Physiological
Psychology." They should also have chapters in our story.
3. There is besides another truth which the psychologist nowadays
finds very fruitful for his knowledge of the mind; this is the fact
that minds vary much in different individuals, or classes of
individuals. First, there is the pronounced difference between healthy
minds and diseased minds. The differences are so great that we have to
pursue practically different methods of treating the diseased, not
only as a class apart from the well minds--putting such diseased
persons into institutions--but also as differing from one another.
Just as the different forms of bodily disease teach us a great deal
about the body--its degree of strength, its forms of organization and
function, its limitations, its heredity, the inter-connection of its
parts, etc.--so mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind.
This gives another sphere of information which constitutes "Abnormal
Psychology" or "Mental Pathology."
[Illustration: PLATE I.]
[Illustration: PLATE II.]
There are also very striking variations between individuals even
within normal life; well people are very different from one another.
All that is commonly meant by character or temperament as
distinguishing one person from another is evidence of these
differences. But really to know all about mind we should see what its
variations are, and endeavour to find out why the variations exist.
This gives, then, another topic, "Individual or Variational
Psychology." This subject should also have notice in the story.
4. Allied with this the demand is made upon the psychologist that he
show to the teacher how to train the mind; how to secure its
development in the individual most healthfully and productively, and
with it all in a way to allow the variations of endowment which
individuals show each to bear its ripest fruit. This is "Educational
or Pedagogical Psychology."
5. Besides all these great undertakings of the psychologist, there is
another department of fact which he must some time find very fruitful,
although as yet he has not been able to investigate it thoroughly: he
should ask about the place of the mind in the world at large. If we
seek to know what the mind has done in the world, what a wealth of
story comes to us from the very beginnings of history! Mind has done
all that has been done: it has built human institutions, indited
literature, made science, discovered the laws of Nature, used the
forces of the material world, embodied itself in all the monuments
which stand to testify to the presence of man. What could tell us more
of what mind is than this record of what mind has done? The
ethnologists are patiently tracing the records left by early man in
his utensils, weapons, clothing, religious rites, architectural
remains, etc., and the anthropologists are seeking to distinguish the
general and essential from the accidental and temporary in all the
history of culture and civilization. They are making progress very
slowly, and it is only here and there that principles are being
discovered which reveal to the psychologist the necessary modes of
action and development of the mind. All this comes under the head of
"Race Psychology."
6. Finally, another department, the newest of all, investigates the
action of minds when they are thrown together in crowds. The animals
herd, the insects swarm, most creatures live in companies; they are
gregarious, and man no less is social in his nature. So there is a
psychology of herds, crowds, mobs, etc., all put under the heading of
"Social Psychology." It asks the question, What new phases of the mind
do we find when individuals unite in common action?--or, on the other
hand, when they are artificially separated?
We now have with all this a fairly complete idea of what The Story of
the Mind should include, when it is all told. Many men are spending
their lives each at one or two of these great questions. But it is
only as the results are all brought together in a consistent view of
that wonderful thing, the mind, that we may hope to find out all that
it is. We must think of it as a growing, developing thing, showing its
stages of evolution in the ascending animal scale, and also in the
unfolding of the child; as revealing its nature in every change of our
daily lives which we experience and tell to one another or find
ourselves unable to tell; as allowing itself to be discovered in the
laboratory, and as willing to leave the marks of its activity on the
scientist's blackened drum and the dial of the chronoscope; as subject
to the limitations of health and disease, needing to be handled with
all the resources of the asylum, the reformatory, the jail, as well as
with the delicacy needed to rear the sensitive girl or to win the love
of the bashful maid; as manifesting itself in the development of
humanity from the first rude contrivances for the use of fire, the
first organizations for defence, and the first inscriptions of picture
writing, up to the modern inventions in electricity, the complex
constitutions of government, and the classic productions of literary
art; and as revealing its possibilities finally in the brutal acts of
the mob, the crimes of a lynching party, and the deeds of collective
righteousness performed by our humane and religious societies.
It would be impossible, of course, within the limits of this little
volume, to give even the main results in so many great chapters of
this ambitious and growing science. I shall not attempt that; but the
rather select from the various departments certain outstanding results
and principles. From these as elevations the reader may see the
mountains on the horizon, so to speak, which at his leisure, and with
better guides, he may explore. The choice of materials from so rich a
store has depended also, as the preface states, on the writer's
individual judgment, and it is quite probable that no one will find
the matters altogether wisely chosen. All the great departments now
thus briefly described, however, are represented in the following
chapters.
CHAPTER II.
WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON--INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
Of all the sources now indicated from which the psychologist may draw,
that of so-called Introspective Psychology--the actual reports of what
we find going on in our minds from time to time--is the most
important. This is true for two great reasons, which make Psychology
different from all the other sciences. The first claim which the
introspective method has upon us arises from the fact that it is only
by it that we can examine the mind directly, and get its events in
their purity. Each of us knows himself better than he knows any one
else. So this department, in which we deal each with his own
consciousness at first hand, is more reliable, if free from error,
than any of those spheres in which we examine other persons, so long
as we are dealing with the psychology of the individual. The second
reason that this method of procedure is most important is found in the
fact that all the other departments of psychology--and with them all
the other sciences--have to use introspection, after all, to make sure
of the results which they get by other methods. For example, the
natural scientist, the botanist, let us say, and the physical
scientist, the electrician, say, can not observe the plants or the
electric sparks without really using his introspection upon what is
before him. The light from the plant has to go into his brain and
leave a certain effect in his mind, and then he has to use
introspection to report what he sees. The astronomer who has bad eyes
can not observe the stars well or discover the facts about them,
because his introspection in reporting what he sees proceeds on the
imperfect and distorted images coming in from his defective eyesight.
So a man given to exaggeration, who is not able to report truthfully
what he remembers, can not be a good botanist, since this defect in
introspection will render his observation of the plants unreliable.
In practice the introspective method has been most important, and the
development of psychology has been up to very recently mainly due to
its use. As a consequence, there are many general principles of mental
action and many laws of mental growth already discovered which should
in the first instance engage our attention. They constitute the main
framework of the building; and we should master them well before we go
on to find the various applications which they have in the other
departments of the subject.
The greater results of "Introspective" or, as it is very often called,
"General" psychology may be summed up in a few leading principles,
which sound more or less abstract and difficult, but which will have
many concrete illustrations in the subsequent chapters. The facts of
experience, the actual events which we find taking place in our minds,
fall naturally into certain great divisions. These are very easily
distinguished from one another. The first distinction is covered by
the popularly recognised difference between "thought and conduct," or
"knowledge and life." On the one hand, the mind is looked at as
receiving, taking in, learning; and on the other hand, as acting,
willing, doing this or that. Another great distinction contrasts a
third mental condition, "feeling," with both of the other two. We say
a man has knowledge, but little feeling, head but no heart; or that he
knows and feels the right but does not live up to it.
I. On the side of Reception we may first point out the avenues through
which our experiences come to us: these are the senses--a great
number, not simply the five special senses of which we were taught in
our childhood. Besides Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, and Touch, we now
know of certain others very definitely. There are Muscle sensations
coming from the moving of our limbs, Organic sensations from the inner
vital organs, Heat and Cold sensations which are no doubt distinct
from each other, Pain sensations probably having their own physical
apparatus, sensations from the Joints, sensations of Pressure, of
Equilibrium of the body, and a host of peculiar sensational conditions
which, for all we know, may be separate and distinct, or may arise
from combinations of some of the others. Such, for example, are the
sensations which are felt when a current of electricity is sent
through the arm.
All these give the mind its material to work upon; and it gets no
material in the first instance from any other source. All the things
we know, all our opinions, knowledges, beliefs, are absolutely
dependent at the start upon this supply of material from our senses;
although, as we shall see, the mind gets a long way from its first
subjection to this avalanche of sensations which come constantly
pouring in upon it from the external world. Yet this is the essential
and capital function of Sensation: to supply the material on which the
mind does the work in its subsequent thought and action.
Next comes the process by which the mind holds its material for future
use, the process of Memory; and with it the process by which it
combines its material together in various useful forms, making up
things and persons out of the material which has been received and
remembered--called Association of Ideas, Thinking, Reasoning, etc. All
these processes used to be considered as separate "faculties" of the
soul and as showing the mind doing different things. But that view is
now completely given up. Psychology now treats the activity of the
mind in a much more simple way. It says: Mind does only one thing; in
all these so-called faculties we have the mind doing this one thing
only on the different materials which come and go in it. This one
thing is the combining, or holding together, of the elements which
first come to it as sensations, so that it can act on a group of them
as if they were only one and represented only one external thing. Let
me illustrate this single and peculiar sort of process as it goes on
in the mind.
We may ask how the child apprehends an orange out there on the table
before him. It can not be said that the orange goes into the child's
mind by any one of its senses. By sight he gets only the colour and
shape of the orange, by smell he gets only its odour, by taste its
sweetness, and by touch its smoothness, rotundity, etc. Furthermore,
by none of these senses does he find out the individuality of the
orange, or distinguish it from other things which involve the same or
similar sensations--say an apple. It is easy to see that after each of
the senses has sent in its report something more is necessary: the
combining of them all together in the same place and at the same
time, the bringing up of an appropriate name, and with that a sort of
relating or distinguishing of this group of sensations from those of
the apple. Only then can we say that the knowledge, "here is an
orange," has been reached. Now this is the _one typical way the mind
has of acting_, this combining of all the items or groups of items
into ever larger and more fruitful combinations. This is called
Apperception. The mind, we say, "apperceives" the orange when it is
able to treat all the separate sensations together as standing for one
thing. And the various circumstances under which the mind does this
give the occasions for the different names which the earlier
psychology used for marking off different "faculties."
These names are still convenient, however, and it may serve to make
the subject clear, as well as to inform the reader of the meaning of
these terms, to show how they all refer to this one kind of mental
action.
The case of the orange illustrates what is usually called Perception.
It is the case in which the result is the knowledge of an actual
object in the outside world. When the same process goes on after the
actual object has been removed it is Memory. When it goes on again in
a way which is not controlled by reference to such an outside
object--usually it is a little fantastic, as in dreams or fancy, but
often it is useful as being so well done as to anticipate what is
really true in the outside world--then it is Imagination. If it is
actually untrue, but still believed in, we call it Illusion or
Hallucination. When it uses mere symbols, such as words, gestures,
writing, etc., to stand for whole groups of things, it is Thinking or
Reasoning. So we may say that what the mind arrives at through this
its one great way of acting, no matter which of these forms it takes
on, except in the cases in which it is not true in its results to the
realities, is Knowledge.
Thus we see that the terms and faculties of the older psychology can
be arranged under this doctrine of Apperception without the necessity
of thinking of the mind as doing more than the one thing. It simply
groups and combines its material in different ways and in ever higher
degrees of complexity.
Apperception, then, is the one principle of mental activity on the
side of its reception and treatment of the materials of experience.
There is another term very current in psychology by which this same
process is sometimes indicated: the phrase Association of Ideas. This
designates the fact that when two things have been perceived or
thought of together, they tend to come up together in the mind in the
future; and when a thing has been perceived which resembles another,
or is contrasted with it, they tend to recall each other in the same
way. It is plain, however, that this phrase is applied to the single
thoughts, sensations, or other mental materials, in their relations or
connections among themselves. They are said to be "associated" with
one another. This way of speaking of the mental materials, instead of
speaking of the mind's activity, is convenient; and it is quite right
to do so, since it is no contradiction to say that the thoughts, etc.,
which the mind "apperceives" remain "associated" together. From this
explanation it is evident that the Association of Ideas also comes
under the mental process of Apperception of which we have been
speaking.
There is, however, another tendency of the mind in the treatment of
its material, a tendency which shows us in actual operation the
activity with which we have now become familiar. When we come to look
at any particular case of apperception or association we find that the
process must go on from the platform which the mind's attainments have
already reached. The passing of the mental states has been likened to
a stream which flows on from moment to moment with no breaks. It is so
continuous that we can never say: "I will start afresh, forget the
past, and be uninfluenced by my history." However we may wish this, we
can never do it; for the oncoming current of the stream is just what
we speak of as ourselves, and we can not avoid bringing the memories,
imaginations, expectations, disappointments, etc., up to the present.
So the effect which any new event or experience, happening for the
first time, is to have upon us depends upon the way it fits into the
current of these onflowing influences. The man I see for the first
time may be so neutral to me that I pass him unregarded. But let him
return after I have once remarked him, or let him resemble a man whom
I know, or let him give me some reason to observe, fear, revere, think
of him in any way, then he is a positive factor in my stream. He has
been taken up into the flow of my mental life, and he henceforth
contributes something to it.
For example, a little child, after learning to draw a man's face, with
two eyes, the nose and mouth, and one ear on each side, will
afterward, when told to draw a profile, still put in two eyes and
affix an ear to each side. The drift of mental habit tells on the new
result and he can not escape it.
He will still put in the two eyes and two ears when he has before him
a copy showing only one ear and neither eye.
In all such cases the new is said to be Assimilated to the old. The
customary figure for man in the child's memory assimilates the
materials of the new copy set before him.
Now this tendency is universal. The mind must assimilate its new
material as much as possible, thus making the old stand for the new.
Otherwise there would be no containing the fragmentary details which
we should have to remember and handle. Furthermore, it is through this
tendency that we go on to form the great classes of objects--such as
man, animal, virtue--into which numbers of similar details are put,
and which we call General Notions or Concepts.
We may understand by Assimilation, therefore, the general tendency of
new experiences to be treated by us in the ways which similar material
has been treated before, with the result that the mind proceeds from
the particular case to the general class.
Summing up our outcome so far, we find that general psychology has
reached three great principles in its investigation of knowledge.
First, we have the combining tendency of the mind, the grouping
together and relating of mental states and of things, called
_Apperception_. Then, second, there are the particular relations
established among the various states, etc., which are combined; these
are called _Associations_ of Ideas. And, third, there is the tendency
of the mind to use its old experiences and habits as general patterns
or nets for the sorting out and distributing of all the new details of
daily life; this is called _Assimilation_.
II. Let us now turn to the second great aspect of the mind, as general
or introspective psychology considers it, the aspect which presents
itself in Action or conduct. The fact that we act is of course as
important as the fact that we think or the fact that we feel; and the
distinction which separates thought and action should not be made too
sharp.
Yet there is a distinction. To understand action we must again go to
introspection. This comes out as soon as we ask how we reach our
knowledge of the actions of others. Of course, we say at once that we
see them. And that is true; we do see them, while as to their thoughts
we only infer them from what we see of their action. But, on the other
hand, we may ask: How do we come to infer this or that thought from
this or that action of another? The only reply is: Because when we act
in the same way this is the way we feel. So we get back in any case to
our own consciousness and must ask how is this action related to this
thought in our own mind.
To this question psychology has now a general answer: Our action is
always the result of our thought, of the elements of knowledge which
are at the time present in the mind. Of course, there are actions
which we do from purely nervous reasons. These are the Instincts,
which come up again when we consider the animals. But these we may
neglect so long as we are investigating actions which we consider our
own. Apart from the Instincts, the principle holds that behind every
action which our conduct shows there must be something thought of,
some sensation or knowledge then in mind, some feeling swelling within
our breast, which prompts to the action.
This general principle is Motor Suggestion. It simply means that we
are unable to have any thought or feeling whatever, whether it comes
from the senses, from memory, from the words, conduct, or command of
others, which does not have a direct influence upon our conduct. We
are quite unable to avoid the influence of our own thoughts upon our
conduct, and often the most trivial occurrences of our daily lives act
as suggestions to deeds of very great importance to ourselves and
others. For example, the influence of the newspaper reports of crime
stimulate other individuals to perform the same crimes by this
principle of suggestion; for the fact is that the reading of the
report causes us to entertain the thoughts, and these thoughts tend to
arouse in us their corresponding trains of suggested action.
The most interesting and striking sphere of operation of the principle
of Suggestion (of other sorts as well as motor) is what is commonly
known simply as Hypnotism. To that, as well as to further
illustrations of Suggestion, we will return later on.
We are able, however, to see a little more in detail how the law of
Motor Suggestion works by asking what sort of action is prompted in
each case of thought or feeling, at the different levels of the mind's
activity which have been distinguished above as all illustrating
Apperception--e.g., the stages known as Perception, Imagination,
Reasoning, etc.
We act, of course, on our perceptions constantly; most of our routine
life is made up of such action on the perceptions of objects which lie
about us. The positions of things in the house, in the streets, in the
office, in the store, are so well known that we carry out a series of
actions with reference to these objects without much supervision from
our consciousness. Here the law of Motor Suggestion works along under
the guidance of Perception, Memory, and the Association of Ideas. Then
we find also, in much of our action, an element due to the exercise of
the Imagination. We fill in the gaps in the world of perception by
imagining appropriate connections; and we then act as if we knew that
these imaginations were realities. This is especially true in our
intercourse with our fellow-men. We never really know what they will
do from time to time. Their action is still future and uncertain; but
from our familiarity with their character, we surmise or imagine what
they expect or think, and we then act so as to make our conduct fit
into theirs. Here is suggestion of a personal kind which depends upon
our ability, in a sense, to reconstruct the character of others,
leading us out into appropriate action. This is the sphere of the most
important affairs of our lives. It appears especially so when we
consider its connection with the next great sort of action from
suggestion.
This next and highest sphere is action from the general or abstract
thoughts which we have been able to work up by the apperceiving
activity of the mind. In this sphere we have a special name for those
thoughts which influence us directly and lead us to action: we call
such thoughts Motives. We also have a special name for the sort of
action which is prompted by clearly-thought-out motives: Will. But in
spite of this emphasis given to certain actions of ours as springing
from what is called Will, we must be careful to see that Will is not a
new faculty, or capacity, added to mind, and which is different from
the ways of action which the mind had before the Will arose. Will is
only a name for the action upon suggestions of conduct which are so
clear in our minds that we are able to deliberate upon them, acting
only after some reflection, and so having a sense that the action
springs from our own choice. The real reasons for action, however, are
thoughts, in this case, just as in the earlier cases they were. In
this case we call them Motives; but we are dependent upon these
Motives, these Suggestions; we can not act without Motives, nor can we
fail to act on those Motives which we have; just as, in the earlier
cases, we could not act without some sort of Perceptions or
Imaginations or Memories, and we could not fail to act on the
Perceptions or other mental states which we had. Voluntary action or
Will is therefore only a complex and very highly conscious case of the
general law of Motor Suggestion; it is the form which suggested action
takes on when Apperception is at its highest level.
The converse of Suggestion is also true--that we can not perform an
action without having in the mind at the time the appropriate thought,
or image, or memory to suggest the action. This dependence of action
upon the thought which the mind has at the time is conclusively shown
in certain patients having partial paralysis. These patients find that
when the eyes are bandaged they can not use their limbs, and it is
simply because they can not realize without seeing the limb how it
would feel to move it; but open the eyes and let them see the
limb--then they move it freely. A patient can not speak when the
cortex of the brain is injured in the particular spot which is used in
remembering how the words feel or sound when articulated. Many such
cases lead to the general position that for each of our intentional
actions we must have some way of thinking about the action, of
remembering how it feels, looks, etc.; we must have something in mind
_equivalent_ to the experience of the movement. This is called the
principle of Kinæsthetic Equivalents, an expression which loses its
formidable sound when we remember that "kinæsthetic" means having the
feeling of movement; so the principle expresses the truth that we must
in every case have some thought or mental picture in mind which is
equivalent to the feeling of the movement we desire to make; if not,
we can not succeed in making it.
What we mean by the "freedom" of the will is not ability to do
anything without thinking, but ability to think all the alternatives
together and to act on this larger thought. Free action is the fullest
expression of thought and of the Self which thinks it.
It is interesting to observe the child getting his Equivalents day by
day. He can not perform a new movement simply by wishing to do so; he
has no Equivalents in his mind to proceed upon. But as he learns the
action, gradually striking the proper movements one by one--oftenest
by imitation, as we will see later on--he stores the necessary
Equivalents up in his memory, and afterward only needs to think how
the movements feel or look, or how words sound, to be able to make
the movements or speak the words forthwith.
III. Introspection finds another great class of conditions in
experience, again on the receptive side--conditions which convert the
mind from the mere theatre of indifferent changes into the vitally
interested, warmly intimate thing which our mental life is to each of
us. This is the sphere of Feeling. We may see without more ado that
while we are receiving sensations and thoughts and suggestions, and
acting upon them in the variety of ways already pointed out, we
ourselves are not indifferent spectators of this play, this
come-and-go of processes. We are directly implicated; indeed, the very
sense of a self, an ego, a me-and-mine, in each consciousness, arises
from the fact that all this come-and-go is a personal growth. The mind
is not a mere machine doing what the laws of its action prescribe. We
find that nothing happens which does not affect the mind itself for
better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, for pleasure or for
pain; and there spring up a series of attitudes of the mind itself,
according as it is experiencing or expecting to experience what to it
is good or bad. This is, then, the great meaning of Feeling; it is the
sense in the mind that it is itself in some way influenced for good or
for ill by what goes on within it. It stands midway between thought
and action. We feel with reference to what we think, and we act
because we feel. All action is guided by feeling.
Feeling shows two well-marked characters: first, the Excitement of
taking a positive attitude; and, second, the Pleasure or Pain that
goes with it.
Here, again, it may suffice to distinguish the stages which arise as
we go from the higher to the lower, from the life of Sensation and
Perception up to that of Thought. This was our method in both of the
other phases of the mental life--Knowledge and Action. Doing this,
therefore, in the case of Feeling also, we find different terms
applied to the different phases of feeling. In the lowest sort of
mental life, as we may suppose the helpless newborn child to have it,
and as we also think it exists in certain low forms of animal life,
feeling is not much more than Pleasures and Pains depending largely
upon the physical conditions under which life proceeds. It is likely
that there are both Pleasures and Pains which are actually sensations
with special nerve apparatus of their own; and there are also states
of the Comfortable and the Uncomfortable, or of pleasant and
unpleasant feeling, due to the way the mind is immediately affected.
These are conditions of Excitement added to the Sensations of Pleasure
and Pain.
Coming up to the life of Memory and Imagination, we find many great
classes of Emotions testifying to the attitudes which the mind takes
toward its experiences. They are remarkably rich and varied, these
emotions. Hope gives place to its opposite despair, joy to sorrow, and
regret succeeds expectation. No one can enumerate the actual phases of
the emotional life. The differences which are most pronounced--as
between hope and fear, joy and sorrow, anger and love--have special
names, and their stimulating causes are so constant that they have
also certain fixed ways of showing themselves in the body, the
so-called emotional Expressions. It is by these that we see and
sympathize with the emotional states of other persons. The most that
we have room here to say is that there is a constant ebb and flow, and
that we rarely attain a state of relative freedom from the influence
of emotion.
The fixed bodily Expressions of emotion are largely hereditary and
common to man and the animals. It is highly probable that they first
arose as attitudes useful in the animal's environments for defence,
flight, seizure, embrace, etc., and have descended to man as
survivals, so becoming indications of states of the mind.
The final and highest manifestation of the life of feeling is what we
call Sentiment. Sentiment is aroused in response to certain so-called
ideal states of thought. The trend of mental growth toward constantly
greater adequacy in its knowledge leads it to anticipate conditions
when its attainments will be made complete. There are certain sorts of
reality whose completeness, thus imagined, arouses in us emotional
states of the greatest power and value. The thought of God gives rise
to the Religious sentiment, that of the good to the Ethical or Moral
sentiment, that of the beautiful to the Esthetic sentiment. These
sentiments represent the most refined and noble fruitage of the life
of feeling, as the thoughts which they accompany refer to the most
elevated and ideal objects. And it is equally true that the conduct
which is performed under the inspiration of Sentiment is the noblest
and most useful in which man can engage.
CHAPTER III.
THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL--COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
It has already been pointed out that the animal has a very important
share of the endowment which we call mind. Only recently has he been
getting his due. He was formerly looked upon, under the teachings of a
dualistic philosophy and of a jealous humanity, as a soulless machine,
a mere automaton which was moved by the starting of certain springs to
run on until the machine ran down. There are two reasons that this
view has been given up, each possibly important enough to have
accomplished the revolution and to have given rise to Animal
Psychology.
First, there is the rise of the evolution theory, which teaches that
there is no absolute break between man and the higher animals in the
matter of mental endowment, and that what difference there is must
itself be the result of the laws of mental growth; and the second
reason is that the more adequate the science of the human mind has
become the more evident has it also become that man himself is more of
a machine than had been supposed. Man grows by certain laws; his
progress is conditioned by the environment, both physical and social,
in which he lives; his mind is a part of the natural system of things.
So with the animal. The animal fulfils, as far as he can, the same
sort of function; he has his environment, both physical and social; he
works under the same laws of growth which man also obeys; his mind
exhibits substantially the same phenomena which the human mind
exhibits in its early stages in the child. All this means that the
animal has as good right to recognition, as a mind-bearing creature,
so to speak, as the child; and if we exclude him we should also
exclude the child. Further, this also means--what is more important
for the science of psychology--that the development of the mind in its
early stages and in certain of its directions of progress is revealed
most adequately in the animals.
_Animal Instinct._--Turning to the animals, the first thing to strike
us is the remarkable series of so-called animal Instincts. Everybody
knows what animal instincts are like; it is only necessary to go to a
zoölogical garden to see them in operation on a large scale. Take the
house cat and follow her through the life of a single day, observing
her actions. She washes her face and makes her toilet in the morning
by instinct. She has her peculiar instinctive ways of catching the
mouse for breakfast. She whets her appetite by holding back her meal
possibly for an hour, in the meantime playing most cruelly with the
pitiful mouse, letting it run and catching it again, and doing this
over and over. If she has children she attends to their training in
the details of cat etiquette and custom with the utmost care, all by
instinct; and the kittens instinctively respond to her attentions. She
conducts herself during the day with remarkable cleanliness of life,
making arrangements which civilized man follows with admiration. She
shows just the right abhorrence of water for a creature that is not
able to swim. She knows just what enemies to fly from and when to turn
and fight, using with inborn dexterity her formidable claws. She
prefers nocturnal excursions and sociabilities, having eyes which
make it safe to be venturesome in the dark. She has certain vocal
expressions of her emotions, which man in vain attempts to eradicate
with all the agencies of domestication. She has special arts to
attract her mate, and he in turn is able to charm her with songs which
charm nobody else. And so on, almost _ad infinitum_.
Observe the dog, the birds of different species, the monkeys, the
hares, and you find wonderful differences of habit, each adapting the
animal differently, but with equal effectiveness, to the life which he
in particular is called upon to lead. The ants and bees are
notoriously expert in the matter of instinct. They have colonies in
which some of the latest principles of social organization seem to
find analogues: slavery, sexual regulations, division of labour,
centralization of resources, government distribution of food, capital
punishment, etc.
All this--not to stop upon details which the books on animal life give
in great abundance--has furnished grounds for speculation for
centuries, and it is only in the last generation that the outlines of
a theory of instinct have been filled in with substantial knowledge. A
rapid sketch of this theory may be drawn in the following pages.
1. In instinct in general there is a basis of inherited nervous
tendency toward the performance of just the sort of action which the
instinct exhibits. This nervous tendency shows itself independently of
learning by the individual in a great many cases, as in the instinct
of sucking by young animals, pecking for food by young fowls, the
migrating actions of adult mammals and birds, the courting movements
of many varieties of animal species. In all this we have what is
called the "perfect" instinct. To be perfect, an instinct must be
carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready,
without any instruction, any model to imitate, any experience to go
upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely congenital or inborn; the
nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or
growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as
the external conditions of life are such as to make its performance
appropriate and useful.
2. On the other hand, many instincts--indeed, probably the greater
number--are not perfect, but "imperfect." Imperfect instincts are
those which do not fully equip the animal with the function in
question, but only take him part way to the goal. He has a spontaneous
tendency to do certain things, such as building a nest, singing, etc.;
but he is not able to do these things adequately or perfectly if left
to himself from birth. This sort of endowment with imperfect instincts
has been the field of some of the most interesting research in animal
psychology, and has led to a new view of the relation of instinct to
intelligence.
3. It has been found that young animals, birds, etc., depend upon the
example and instruction of adults for the first performance of many
actions that seem to be instinctive. This dependence may exist even in
cases in which there is yet a congenital tendency to perform the
action. Many birds, for example, have a general instinct to build a
nest; but in many cases, if put in artificial circumstances, they
build imperfect nests. Birds also have an instinct to make vocal
calls; but if kept from birth out of hearing of the peculiar notes of
their species, they come to make cries of a different sort, or learn
to make the notes of some other species with which they are thrown.
4. The principal agency for the learning of the animals, and for the
supplementing of their instincts, is Imitation. The sight of certain
movements on the part of the adult animals, or the hearing of their
cries, calls, notes, etc., leads the young to fall into an imitation
of these movements or vocal performances. The endowment which such a
young animal has in the direction of making movements and cries
similar to those of his species aids him, of course, in imitating
these in preference to others. So the endowment and the tendency to
imitate directly aid each other in all such functions, and hurry the
little creature on in his acquisition of the habits of his species. We
find young animals clinging even in their imitations pretty closely to
their own proper fathers and mothers, who are thus enabled to bring
them up _comme il faut_.
5. There is every reason to think, moreover, that the tendency to
imitate is itself instinctive. Young animals, notably the monkey and
the child, fall spontaneously to imitating when they reach a certain
age. Imitation shows itself to be instinctive in the case of the
mocking bird, the parrot, etc. Furthermore, the mechanism of this
function of imitation is now very well known. The principle of
psychology recognised above under the phrase Kinæsthetic Equivalents,
teaches us that the idea of a movement, coming into the mind through
sight or some other sense, stirs up the proper apparatus to bring
about the same movement in the observer. This we see in the common
tendency of an audience to repeat the gestures of a speaker, and in
many similar cases. When this principle is extended to include all
sorts of experiences besides those of movement, we have what is
generally called Imitation. Moreover, every time that by action the
child imitates, he perceives his own imitation, and this again acts as
a "copy" or model for another repetition of the act, and so on. This
method of keeping himself going gives the young animal or child
constant practice, and renders him more and more efficient in the acts
necessary to his life.
6. It is evident what great profit accrues from this arrangement
whereby a general instinct like imitation takes the place of a number
of special instincts, or supplements them. It gives a measure of
plasticity to the creature. He can now respond suitably to changes in
the environment in which he lives. The special instincts, on the
contrary, are for the most part so fixed that the animal must act just
as they require him to in this or that circumstance; but as soon as
his instinct takes on the form of imitation, the resulting action
tends to conform itself to the model actions of the other creatures
which set "copies" before him.
These more or less new results due to recent research in the province
of Instinct have had direct bearing upon theories of the origin of
instinct and of its place in animal life.
_Theories of Instinct._--Apart from the older view which saw in animal
instinct simply a matter of original created endowment, whereby each
animal was made once for all "after his kind," and according to which
there is no further reason that the instincts are what they are than
that they were made so; apart from this "special creation" view, two
different ideas have had currency, both based upon the theory of
evolution. Each of these views assumes that the instincts have been
developed from more simple animal actions by a gradual process; but
they differ as to the elements originally entering into the actions
which afterward became instinctive.
1. First, there is what is called the Reflex Theory. This holds that
instincts are reflex actions, like the closing of the eye when an
object threatens to enter it, only much more complex. They are due to
the compounding and adding together of simple reflexes, in greater and
greater number, and with increasing efficiency. This theory attempts
to account for instinct entirely in terms of nervous action. It goes
with that view of evolution which holds that the nervous system has
had its growth from generation to generation by the continued reflex
adjustments of the organism to its environment, whereby more and more
delicate adaptations to the external world were secured. In this way,
say the advocates of this theory, we may account for the fact that the
animal has no adequate knowledge of what he is doing when he performs
an act instinctively; he has no end or aim in his mind; he simply
feels his nervous system doing what it is fitted to do by its organic
adaptations to the stimulations of air, and earth, and sea, whatever
these may be.
But it may be asked: Why do succeeding generations improve each on its
parents, so that there is a gradual tendency to perfect the instinct?
The answer to this question brings up another great law of
biology--the principle of Variations. This principle states the common
fact that in every case of a family of offspring the individual young
vary slightly in all directions from their parents. Admitting this, we
will find in each group of families some young individuals which are
better than their parents; these will have the advantage over others
and will be the ones to grow up and have the children of the next
generation again, and so on. So by constant Variation and Natural
Selection--that is, the "Survival of the Fittest" in competition with
the rest--there will be constant improvement in the Instinct.
2. The other theory, the rival one, holds that there are some
instincts which show so plainly the marks of Reason that some degree
of intelligent adjustment to the environment must be allowed to the
animal in the acquiring of these functions. For example, we are told
that some of the muscular movements involved in the instincts--such,
for example, as the bird's nest-building--are so complex and so finely
adjusted to an end, that it is straining belief to suppose that they
could have arisen gradually by reflex adaptation alone. There is also
a further difficulty with the reflex theory which has seemed
insurmountable to many of the ablest psychologists of animal life; the
difficulty, namely, that many of the instincts require the action of a
great many muscles at the same time, so acting in "correlation" with
or support of one another that it is impossible to suppose that the
instinct has been acquired gradually. For in the very nature of these
cases we can not suppose the instinct to have ever been imperfect,
seeing that the partial instinct which would have preceded the perfect
performance for some generations would have been not only of no use to
the creature, but in many cases positively injurious. For instance,
what use to an animal to be able partly to make the movements of
swimming, or to the birds to build an inadequate nest? Such instincts
would not be usable at all. So we are told by the second theory that
the animals must have had intelligence to do these things when they
first acquired them. Yet, as is everywhere admitted, after the
instinct has been acquired by the species it is then carried out
without knowledge and intelligent design, being handed down from
generation to generation by heredity.
This seems reasonable, for we do find that actions which were at first
intelligent may be performed so frequently that we come to do them
without thinking of them; to do them from habit. So the animals, we
are told, have come to do theirs reflexly, although at first they
required intelligence. From this point of view--that although
intelligence was at first required, yet the actions have become
instinctive and lacking in intelligent direction in later
generations--this is called the theory of Lapsed Intelligence.
This theory has much to commend it. It certainly meets the objection
to the reflex theory which was stated just above--the objection that
some of the instincts could not have arisen by gradual reflex
adaptations. It also accounts for the extremely intelligent appearance
which many instincts have.
But this view in turn is liable to a criticism which has grown in
force with the progress of biological knowledge in recent years. This
criticism is based on the fact that the theory of lapsed intelligence
demands that the actions which the animals of one generation have
acquired by their intelligence should be handed down through heredity
to the next generation, and so on. It is evident that unless this be
true it does no good to the species for one generation to do things
intelligently, seeing that if the effects on the nervous system are
not transmitted to their children, then the next and later generations
will have to start exactly where their fathers did, and the actions in
question will never become ingrained in the nervous system at all.
Now, the force of this criticism is overwhelming to those who
believe--as the great majority of biologists now do[1]--that none of
the modifications or so-called "characters" acquired by the parents,
none of the effects of use or disuse of their limbs, none of the
tendencies or habits of action, in short, none of the changes wrought
in body or mind of the parents during their lifetime, are inherited by
their children. The only sorts of modification which show themselves
in subsequent generations are the deep-seated effects of disease,
poison, starvation, and other causes which concern the system as a
whole, but which show no tendency to reproduce by heredity any of the
special actions or functions which the fathers and mothers may have
learned and practised. If this difficulty could be met, the theory
that intelligence has been at work in the origination of the complex
instincts would be altogether the preferable one of the two; but if
not, then the "lapsed intelligence" view must be thrown overboard.
[Footnote 1: The matter is still under discussion, however, and I do
not mean in any way to deny the authority of those who still accept
the "inheritance of acquired characters."]
Recent discussion of evolution has brought out a point of view under
the name of Organic Selection which has a very fruitful application to
this controversy over the origin of instincts. This point of view is
one which in a measure reconciles the two theories. It claims that it
is possible for the intelligent adaptations, or any sort of
"accommodations," made by the individuals of one generation, to set
the direction of subsequent evolution, even though there be no direct
inheritance of acquired characters from father to son. It proceeds in
the case of instinct somewhat thus:
Suppose we say, with the first theory given above, that the organism
has certain reflexes which show some degree of adaptation to the
environment; then suppose we admit the point, urged by the advocates
of the lapsed intelligence theory, that the gradual improvement of
these reflexes by variations in the endowment of successive
generations would not suffice for the origin of instinct, seeing that
partial instincts would not be useful; and, further, suppose we agree
that many of the complex instincts really involved intelligent
adaptation in their acquisition. These points carefully understood,
then one new and further principle will enable us to complete a theory
which will avoid the objections to both the others. This principle is
nothing else than what we have seen already--namely, that the
intelligence supplements the partial instincts in each generation and
makes them useful in the respects in which they are inadequate, and so
keeps the young alive in successive generations as long as the
instinct is imperfect. This gives the species time gradually to
supplement its instinctive endowment, in the course of many
generations each of which uses its intelligence in the same way: time
to accumulate, by the occurrence of variations among the offspring,
the changes in the nervous system which the perfect instinct requires.
Thus as time goes on the dependence of each generation upon the aid of
intelligence is less and less, until the nervous system becomes
capable of performing the function quite alone. The result then will
be the same as if the acquisitions made by each generation had been
inherited, while in reality they have not. All that this theory
requires in addition to what is admitted by both the historical views
is that the species be kept alive long enough by the aid of its
intelligence, which supplements imperfect instincts, to give it time
to produce sufficient variations in the right direction. The instinct
then achieves its independence, and intelligent supervision of it is
no longer necessary (see Fig. 1).
[Illustration: FIG. 1,--Origin of instinct by Organic Selection: _A
n_, perfect instinct. 1, 2 ... _n_, successive generations. Solid
lines, nervous equipment in the direction of the instinct. Dotted
lines, intelligence supplementing the nervous equipment. The
intelligence is relied upon to keep the species alive until by
congenital variations the nervous equipment becomes "perfect."]
This theory is directly confirmed by the facts, already spoken of,
which show that many instincts are imperfect, but are pieced out and
made effective by the intelligent imitations and acquisitions of the
young creatures. The little chick, for example, does not know the
value of water when he sees it, as essential as water is to his life;
but he depends upon imitation of his mother's drinking, or upon the
mere accident of wetting his bill, to stimulate his partial instinct
of drinking in the peculiar fashion characteristic of fowls, by
throwing back the head. So in other functions which are peculiar to a
species and upon which their very lives depend, we find the delicate
adjustment between intelligent adaptation by conscious action and the
partially formed instincts which the creatures possess.
In the theory of Organic Selection, therefore, we seem to have a
positive solution of the question of the origin of instinct. It is
capable of a similar application in other cases where evolution has
taken certain definite directions, seemingly guided by intelligence.
It shows us that mind has had a positive place in the evolution of
organic nature.
* * * * *
_Animal Intelligence._--Coming to consider what further equipment the
animals have, we light upon the fact just spoken of when we found it
necessary to appeal in some measure to the animal's Intelligence to
supplement his instincts. What is meant by Intelligence?
This word may be used in the broad sense of denoting all use of
consciousness, or mind, considered as a thing in some way additional
to the reflexes of the nervous system. In the life of the animal, as
in that of man, wherever we find the individual doing anything with
reference to a mental picture, using knowledge or experience in any
form, then he is said to be acting intelligently.
The simplest form of intelligent action in the animal world and that
from which most of the higher forms have arisen is illustrated in the
following example: a chick will peck at a strange worm, and, finding
it unpalatable, will then in the future refuse to peck at worms of
that sort. This refusal to do a second time what has once had a
disagreeable result is intelligent. We now say that the chick "knows"
that the worm is not good to eat. The instinctive action of pecking at
all worms is replaced by a refusal to peck at certain worms. Again,
taking the reverse case, we find that the chick which did not respond
to the sight of drinking water instinctively, but had to see the
mother drink first, acted intelligently, or through a state of
consciousness, when it imitated the old hen, and afterward drank of
its own accord. It now "knows" that water is the thing to drink.
The further question which comes upon us here concerns the animal's
acquisition of the action appropriate to carry out his knowledge. How
does he learn the muscular combinations which supplement or replace
the earlier instinctive ways of acting?
This question appears very clearly when we ask about the child's
acquisition of new acts of skill. We find him constantly learning,
modifying his habits, refining his ways of doing things, becoming
possessed of quite new and complex functions, such as speech,
handwriting, etc. All these are intelligent activities; they are
learned very gradually and with much effort and pains. It is one of
the most important and interesting questions of all psychology to ask
how he manages to bring the nervous and muscular systems under greater
and greater control by his mind. How can he modify and gradually
improve his "reactions"--as we call his responses to the things and
situations about him--so as to act more and more intelligently?
The answer seems to be that he proceeds by what has been called
Experimenting. He does not simply do things because he has
intelligence,--simply that is, because he sees how to do them without
first learning how; that is the older and probably quite erroneous
view of intelligence. The mind can not move the body simply by its
fiat. No man can do that. Man, like the little animal, has to try
things and keep on trying things, in order to find out the way they
work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or
bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions
which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart
from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without
aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to
make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of
imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature do; or he
imitates his own instinctive actions by setting up before him in his
mind the memories of the earlier performance; or, yet again, after he
has struck a fortunate combination, he repeats that imitatively. Thus,
by the principle already spoken of, he stores up a great mass of
Kinæsthetic Equivalents, which linger in memory, and enable him to
act appropriately when the proper circumstances come in his way. He
also gets what we have called Associations established between the
acts and the pleasure or pain which they give, and so avoids the
painful and repeats the pleasurable ones.
The most fruitful field of this sort of imitative learning is in
connection with the "try-try-again" struggles of the young, especially
children. This is called Persistent Imitation. The child sees before
him some action to imitate--some complex act of manipulation with the
hand, let us say. He tries to perform it in an experimental way, using
the muscles of the hand and arm. With this he strains himself all
over, twisting his tongue, bending his body, and grimacing from head
to foot, so to speak. Thus he gets a certain way toward the correct
result, but very crudely and inexactly. Then he tries again,
proceeding now on the knowledge which the first effort gave him; and
his trial is less uncouth because he now suppresses some of the
hindering grimacing movements and retains the ones which he sees to be
most nearly correct. Again he tries, and again, persistently but
gradually reducing the blundering movements to the pattern of the
copy, and so learning to perform the act of skill.
The massive and diffused movements which he makes by wriggling and
fussing are also of direct use to him. They increase remarkably the
chances that among them all there will be some movements which will
hit the mark, and so contribute to his stock of correct Equivalents.
Dogs and monkeys learn to unlock doors, let down fence rails, and
perform relatively complex actions by experimenting; persistently
with many varied movements until the successful ones are finally
struck.
This is the type of all those acts of experimenting by which new
complex movements are acquired. In children it proceeds largely
without interference from others; the child persists of himself. He
has greater ability than the animals to see the meaning of the
completed act and to really desire to acquire it. With the animals the
acquisitions do not extend very far, on account of their limitation in
intelligent endowment; but in the training of the domestic animals and
in the education of show-animals the trainer aids them and urges them
on by making use of the associations of pleasure and pain spoken of
above. He supplements the animal's feelings of pain and pleasure with
the whip and with rewards of food, etc., so that each step of the
animal's success or failure has acute associations with pain or
pleasure. Thus the animal gradually gets a number of associations
formed, avoids the actions with which pain is associated, repeats
those which call up memories of pleasure all the way through an
extended performance in regular steps; and in the result the
performance so closely counterfeits the operations of high
intelligence--such as counting, drawing cards, etc.--that the audience
is excited to admiration.
This first glimpse of the animal's limitations when compared with man
may suggest the general question, how far the brutes go in their
intelligent endowment. The proper treatment of this much-debated point
requires certain further explanations.
In the child we find a tendency to act in certain ways toward all
objects, events, etc., which are in any respect alike. After learning
to use the hands, for example, for a certain act, the same hand
movements are afterward used for other similar acts which the child
finds it well to perform. He thus tends, as psychologists say, to
"generalize," that is, to take up certain general attitudes which will
answer for a great many details of experience. On the side of the
reception of his items of knowledge this was called Assimilation, as
will be remembered. This saves him enormous trouble and risk; for as
soon as an object or situation presents itself before him with certain
general aspects, he can at once take up the attitude appropriate to
these general aspects without waiting to learn the particular features
of the new. The ability to do this shows itself in two rather
different ways which seem respectively to characterize man on the one
hand and the lower animals on the other.
With the animals this tendency to generalize, to treat objects in
classes rather than as individuals, takes the form of a sort of
composition or direct union of brain pathways. Different experiences
are had, and then because they are alike they tend to issue in the
same channels of action. The animal is tied down strictly to his
experience; he does not anticipate to any extent what is going to
happen. He does not use one experience as a symbol and apply it
beforehand to other things and events. He is in a sense passive;
stimulations rain down upon him, and force him into certain attitudes
and ways of action. As far as his knowledge is "general" it is called
a Recept. A dog has a Recept of the whip; so far as whips are not too
different from one another, the dog will act in the same way toward
all of them. In man, on the other hand, the development of mind has
gone a decided step further. The child very quickly begins to use
symbols, words being the symbols of first importance to him. He does
not have, like the brute, to wait for successive experiences of like
objects to impress themselves upon him; but he goes out toward the
new, expecting it to be like the old, and so acting as to anticipate
it. He thus falls naturally into general ways of acting which it is
the function of experience to refine and distinguish. He seems to have
more of the higher sort of what was called above Apperception, as
opposed to the more concrete and accidental Associations of Ideas. He
gets Concepts, as opposed to the Recepts of the animals. With this
goes the development of speech, which some psychologists consider the
source of all the man's superiority over the animals. Words become
symbols of a highly abstract sort for certain classes of experiences;
and, moreover, through speech a means of social communication is
afforded by which the development of the individual is enormously
advanced.
It is probable, in fact, that this difference--that between the
Generalization which uses symbols, and mere Association--is the root
of all the differences that follow later on, and give man the
magnificent advantage over the animals which he has. From it is
developed the faculty of thinking, reasoning, etc., in which man
stands practically alone. On the brain side, it requires special
developments both through the preparation of certain brain centres
given over to the speech function, and also through the greater
organization of the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, to which we
revert again in a later chapter. Indeed, looked at from the side of
the development of the brain, we see that there is no break between
man and the animals in the laws of organization, but that the
difference is one of evolution.
Later on in the life of the child we find another contrast connected
with the difference of social life and organization as between the
animals and man. The animals probably do not have a highly organized
sense of Self as man does; and the reason doubtless is that such a
Self-consciousness is the outcome of life and experience in the very
complex social relations in which the human child is brought up, and
which he alone is fitted by his inherited gifts to sustain.
_The Play of Animals._--Another of the most interesting questions of
animal life is that which concerns their plays. Most animals are given
to play. Indeed that they indulge in a remarkable variety of sports is
well known even to the novice in the study of their habits. Beginning
when very young, they gambol, tussle, leap, and run together, chase
one another, play with inanimate objects, as the kitten with the ball,
join in the games of children and adults, as the dog which plays hide
and seek with his little master, and all with a knowingness and zest
which makes them the best of companions. The volumes devoted to the
subject give full accounts of these plays of animals, and we need not
repeat them; the psychologist is interested, however, mainly in the
general function of play in the life of the individual animal and
child, and in the psychological states and motives which it reveals.
Play, whether in animals or in man, shows certain general
characteristics which we may briefly consider.
1. The plays of animals are very largely instinctive, being indulged
in for the most part without instruction. The kitten leaps impulsively
to the game. Little dogs romp untaught, and fall, as do other animals
also, when they are strong enough, into all the playful attitudes
which mark their kind. This is seen strikingly among adult animals in
what are called the courtship plays. The birds, for example, indulge
in elaborate and beautiful evolutions of a playful sort at the mating
season.
2. It follows from their instinctive character that animal plays are
peculiar to the species which perform them. We find series of sports
peculiar to dogs, others to cats, and so on through all the species of
the zoölogical garden, whether the creatures be wild or tame. Each
shows its species as clearly by its sportive habits as by its shape,
cry, or any other of what are called its "specific" habits. This is
important not only to the zoölogist, as indicating differences of
evolution and scale of attainment, environment, etc., but also to the
psychologist, as indicating differences of what we may call animal
temperament. Animals show not only the individual differences which
human beings do, one liking this game and another that, one being
leader in the sport and another the follower, but also the greater
differences which characterize races. The Spaniards love the bull
fight; other nations consider it repulsive, and take their fun in less
brutal forms, although, perchance, they tolerate Rugby football! So
the animals vary in their tastes, some playing incessantly at
fighting, and so zealously as to injure one another, while others
like the milder romp, and the game with flying leaves, rolling stones,
or the incoming waves on the shore.
3. Psychologically, the most interesting characteristic of animal, as
of human, play is what is called the "make-believe" state of mind
which enters into it. If we consider our own sports we find that, in
the midst of the game, we are in a condition of divided consciousness.
We indulge in the scheme of play, whatever it be, as if it were a real
situation, at the same time preserving our sense that it is not real.
That is, we distinguish through it all the actual realities, but make
the convention with our companions that for the time we will act
together as if the playful situation were real. With it there is a
sense that it is a matter of voluntary indulgence that can stop at
anytime; that the whole temporary illusion to which we submit is
strictly our own doing, a job which we have "put up" on ourselves.
That is what is meant by make-believe.
Now it is clear that the animals have this sense of make-believe in
their games both with other animals and with man. The dog plays at
biting the hand of his master, and actually takes the member between
his teeth and mumbles it; but all the while he stops short of painful
pressure, and goes through a series of characteristic attitudes which
show that he distinguishes very clearly between this play biting and
the real. If perchance the master shows signs of being hurt, the dog
falls into attitudes of sorrow, and apologizes fulsomely. So also when
the animals play together, a vigorous squeal from a companion who is
"under" generally brings him his release.
The principal interest of this make-believe consciousness is that it
is considered by many to be an essential ingredient of Æsthetic
feeling. A work of art is said to have its effect through its tendency
to arouse in us a make-believe acceptance of the scene or motive
presented, while it nevertheless remains contrasted with the realities
of our lives. If this be true, the interesting question arises how far
the animals also have the germs of Æsthetic feeling in their
make-believe situations. Does the female pea-fowl consider the male
bird, with all his display of colour and movement, a beautiful object?
And does the animal companion say: How beautiful! when his friend in
the sport makes a fine feint, and comes up serene with the knowing
look, which the human on-looker can not fail to understand?
In some cases, at any rate, we should have to reply to this question
affirmatively, if we considered make-believe the essential thing in
æsthetic enjoyment.
_Theories of Animal Play._--The question of the meaning and value of
play to the animals has had very enlightening discussion of late.
There are two principal theories now advocated.
I. The older theory considered play simply the discharge of surplus
nerve force in the animal's organism. He was supposed to play when he
felt fresh and vigorous. The horse is "skittish" and playful in the
morning, not so much so at night. The dogs lie down and rest when they
are tired, having used up their surplus energies. This is called the
Surplus-Energy Theory of play.
The difficulty with this theory is that it is not adequate to explain
any of the characteristics of play which have been given above. Why
should play be instinctive in its forms, showing certain complex and
ingrained channels of expression, if it were merely the discharge of
surplus force? We are more lively in the morning, but that does not
explain our liking and indulging in certain sorts of complex games at
all hours. Moreover, animals and children will continue to play when
greatly fatigued. A dog, for example, which seems absolutely "used
up," can not resist the renewed solicitations of his friends to
continue the chase. Furthermore, why is it that plays are
characteristic of species, different kinds of animals having plays
quite peculiar to themselves? It is difficult to see how this could
have come about unless there had been some deeper-going reason in
accordance with which each species has learned the particular forms of
sport in which it indulges.
The advocates of this theory attempt to meet these objections by
saying that the imitative instinct accounts for the particular
directions in which the discharges of energy occur. A kitten's plays
are like those of the cat tribe because the kitten is accustomed to
imitate cats; when it falls to playing it is with cats, and so it
sheds its superfluous energies in the customary imitative channels. In
this way it grows to learn the games of its own species. There is a
good deal in this point; most games are imitative in so far as they
are learned at all. But it does not save the theory; for many animal
plays are not learned by the individual at all, as we have seen above;
on the contrary, they are instinctive. In these cases the animal does
not wait to learn the games of his tribe by imitation, but
starts-right-in on his own account. Besides this there are many forms
of animal play which are not imitative at all. In these the animals
co-operate, but do not take the same parts. The young perform actions
in the game which the mother does not.
All this goes to support another and most serious objection to this
theory--in the mind of all those who believe in the doctrine of
evolution. The Surplus-Energy Theory considers the play-impulse, which
is one of the most widespread characters of animal life, as merely an
accidental thing or by-product--a mere using-up of surplus energies.
It is not in any way important to the animals. This makes it
impossible to say that play has come to be the very complex thing that
it really is by the laws of evolution; for survival by natural
selection always supposes that the attribute or character which
survives is important enough to keep the animal alive in the struggle
for existence; otherwise it would not be continued for successive
generations, and gradually perfected on account of its utility.
On the whole, therefore, we find the Surplus-Energy Theory of play
quite inadequate.
II. Another theory therefore becomes necessary if we are to meet these
difficulties. Such a theory has recently been developed. It holds that
the plays of the animals are of the greatest utility to them in this
way: they exercise the young animals in the very activities--though in
a playful way--in which they must seriously engage later on in life. A
survey of the plays of animals with a view to comparing them in each
case with the adult activities of the same species, confirms this
theory in a remarkably large number of cases. It shows the young
anticipating, in their play, the struggles, enjoyments, co-operations,
defeats, emergencies, etc., of their after lives, and by learning to
cope with all these situations, so preparing themselves for the
serious onset of adult responsibilities. On this theory each play
becomes a beautiful case of adaptation to nature. The kitten plays
with the ball as the old cat handles the mouse; the little dogs
wrestle together, and so learn to fight with teeth and claws; the deer
run from one another, and so test their speed and learn to escape
their enemies. If we watch young animals at play we see that not a
muscle or nerve escapes this preliminary training and exercise; and
the instinctive tendencies which control the play direct the
activities into just the performances which the animal's later
life-habits are going on to require.
On this view play becomes of the utmost utility. It is not a
by-product, but an essential part of the animal's equipment. Just as
the infancy period has been lengthened in the higher animals in order
to give the young time to learn all that they require to meet the
harsh conditions of life, so during this infancy period they have in
the play-instinct a means of the first importance for making good use
of their time. It is beautiful to see the adults playing with their
young, adapting their strength to the little ones, repeating the same
exercises without ceasing, drilling them with infinite pains to
greater hardihood, endurance, and skill.
On this theory it is also easy to see why it is that the plays are
different for the different species. The actual life conditions are
different, and the habits of the species are correspondingly
different. So it is only another argument for the truth of this theory
that we find just those games natural to the young which train them
in the habits natural to the old.
This view is now being very generally adopted. Many fine illustrations
might be cited. A simple case may be seen in so small a thing as the
habit of leaping in play; the difference, for example, between the
mountain goat and the common fawn. The former, when playing on level
ground makes a very ludicrous exhibition by jumping in little
up-and-down leaps by which he makes no progress. In contrast with this
the fawn, whose adult life is normally in the plains, takes a long
graceful spring. The difference becomes clear from the point of view
of this theory, when we remember that the goat is to live among the
rocks, where the only useful jump is just the up-and-down sort which
the little fellow is now practising; while the deer, in his life upon
the plains, will always need the running jump.
Finally, on this theory, play becomes a thing for evolution to
cultivate for its utility in the progress of animal life, and for that
reason we may suppose it has been perfected in the remarkable variety
and beauty of form which it shows.
On the psychological side, we find a corresponding state of things.
The mind in the young animal or child gets the main education of early
life through its play situations. Games have an extraordinary
pedagogical influence. The more so because they are the natural and
instinctive way of getting an education in practical things. This
again is of supreme utility to the individuals.
Both for body and mind we find that play illustrates the principle of
Organic Selection explained above. It makes the young animal flexible,
plastic, and adaptable; it supplements all his other instincts and
imperfect functions; it gives him a new chance to live, and so
determines the course of evolution in the direction which the playful
animal represents. The quasi-social and gregarious habits of animals
probably owe much of their strength to the play-impulse, both through
the training of individual animals and through the fixing of these
tendencies as instincts in various animal species in the way just
mentioned.
In another place below I analyze a child's game and draw some
inferences from it. Here it may suffice to say that in their games the
young animals acquire the flexibility of mind and muscle upon which
much of the social co-operation, as well as the individual
effectiveness, of their later life depends. With children, it is not
the only agency, of course, though its importance is not less. We have
to carry the children further by other means; but the other means
should never interfere with this natural schooling. They should aim
the rather by supplementing it wisely to direct its operation and to
extend its sphere.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MIND OF THE CHILD--CHILD PSYCHOLOGY.
One of the most interesting chapters of modern psychology is that
which deals with the child. This is also one of the topics of general
concern, since our common humanity reacts with greater geniality upon
the little ones, in whom we instinctively see innocence and
simplicity. The popular interest in children has been, however--as
uncharitable as it may seem to say it--of very little service to the
scientific investigation of childhood. Even to-day, when a greater
body of valuable results are being secured, the main danger to the
proper study of the child's mind comes from the over-enthusiasm and
uninstructed assurance of some of its friends. Especially is this the
case in America, where "child study" has become a fad to be pursued by
parents and teachers who know little about the principles of
scientific method, and where influential educators have enlisted
so-called "observers" in taking indiscriminate notes on the doings of
children with no definite problem in view, and with no criticism of
their procedure. It is in place, therefore, to say clearly, at the
outset, that this chapter does not mean to stimulate parents or
unpsychological readers to report observations; and further to say
also that in the mind of the writer the publications made lately of
large numbers of replies to "syllabi" are for the most part worthless,
because they heap together observations obtained by persons of every
degree of competence and incompetence.
On the other hand, the requisites here, as in every other sphere of
exact observation, are clear enough. The student of the child's mind
should have a thorough knowledge of the principles of general
psychology, in order to know what is characteristic of the child when
he sees it, and what is exceptional; and he should also have enough
originality in his ideas and interpretations to catch the valuable in
the child's doings, distinguishing it from the commonplace, and to
plan situations and even experiments which will give him some control
upon those actions of the child which seem to be worth it. The need
of these qualities is seen in the history of the problems of the
child's growth which have been taken up even by the most competent
psychologists. The results show a gradual attainment of control over
the problem in hand, each observer criticising the method and results
of his predecessor until certain rules of observation and experiment
have been evolved which allow of the repetition and repeated
observation of the events of the child's life.
As illustrating the sort of problems in which there has been this
careful and critical work, I may instance these: the child's reflex
movements, the beginnings and growth of sensation, such as colour, the
rise of discrimination and preference, the origin of right and
left-handedness, the rise, mechanism, and meaning of imitation, the
acquisition of speech and handwriting, the growth of the child's sense
of personality and of his social consciousness, and the laws of
physical growth, as bearing upon mental development. In all these
cases, however, there is again a greater and a less exactness. The
topics with the reports of results which I am going on to give may be
taken, however, as typical, and as showing the direction of complete
knowledge rather than as having in any one case approached it.
Before we take up particular questions, however, a word may be allowed
upon the general bearings of the study of the child's mind. I do this
the more willingly, since it is still true, in spite of the hopeful
outlook for positive results, that it is mainly the willingness of
psychology to recognise the problems and work at them that makes the
topic important at present. To investigate the child by scientific
methods is really to bring into psychology a procedure which has
revolutionized the natural sciences; and it is destined to
revolutionize the moral sciences by making them also in a great
measure natural sciences. The new and important question about the
mind which is thus recognised is this: _How did it grow?_ What light
upon its activity and nature can we get from a positive knowledge of
its early stages and processes of growth? This at once introduces
other questions: How is the growth of the child related to that of the
animals?--how, through heredity and social influences, to the growth
of the race and of the family and society in which he is brought up?
All this can be comprehended only in the light of the doctrine of
evolution, which has rejuvenated the sciences of life; and we are now
beginning to see a rejuvenation of the sciences of mind from the same
point of view. This is what is meant when we hear it said that
psychology is becoming "genetic."
The advantages to be derived from the study of young children from
this point of view may be briefly indicated.
1. In the first place, the facts of the infant consciousness are very
simple; that is, they are the child's sensations or memories simply,
not his own observations of them. In the adult mind the disturbing
influence of self-observation is a matter of notorious moment. It is
impossible for me to report exactly what I feel, for the observation
of it by my attention alters its character. My volition also is a
complex thing, involving my personal pride and self-consciousness. But
the child's emotion is as spontaneous as a spring. The effects of it
in the mental life come out in action, pure and uninfluenced by
calculation and duplicity and adult reserve. There is around every one
of us adults a web of convention and prejudice of our own making. Not
only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus
lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, but each of us
builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality with
himself. We are subject, as Bacon said, not only to "idols of the
forum," but also to "idols of the den."
The child, on the contrary, has not learned his own importance, his
pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not
observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time,
place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor
the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex
accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness.
2. The study of children is often the only means of testing the truth
of our analyses. If we decide that a certain mental state is due to a
union of simpler elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of
child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so
enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the
child's mental life are so low in the scale, in the matter of mental
endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under
debate in psychology which may not be tested by this method.
At this point it is that child psychology is more valuable than the
study of the mind of animals. The latter never become men, while
children do. The animals represent in some few respects a branch of
the tree of growth in advance of man, while being in many other
respects very far behind him. In studying animals we are always
haunted by the fear that the analogy from him to man may not hold;
that some element essential to the development of the human mind may
not be in the animal at all. Even in such a question as the
localization of the functions of the brain described later on, where
the analogy is one of comparative anatomy and only secondarily of
psychology, the monkey presents analogies with man which dogs do not.
But in the study of children we may be always sure that a normal child
has in him the promise of a normal man.
3. Again, in the study of the child's mind we have the added advantage
of a corresponding simplicity on the bodily side; we are able to take
account of the physiological processes at a time when they are
relatively simple--that is, before the nervous system has grown to
maturity. For example, psychology used to hold that we have a "speech
faculty," an inborn mental endowment which is incapable of further
analysis; but support for the position is wanting when we turn to the
brain of the infant. Not only do we fail to find the series of centres
now known to be the "speech zone," but even those of them which we do
find have not yet taken up this function, either alone or together. In
other words, the primary object of each of the various centres
involved is not speech, but some other and simpler function; and
speech arises by development from a union of these separate functions.
4. In observing young children, a more direct application of
experiment is possible. By "experiment" here I mean both experiment
on the senses and also experiment directly on consciousness by
suggestion, social influence, etc. In experimenting on adults, great
difficulties arise through the fact that reactions--such as performing
a voluntary movement when a signal is heard, etc.--are complicated by
deliberation, habit, custom, choice, etc. The subject hears a sound,
identifies it, and presses a button--_if he choose_ and agree to do
so. What goes on in this interval between the advent of the incoming
nerve process and the discharge of the outgoing nerve process?
Something, at any rate, which represents a brain process of great
complexity. Now, anything that fixes or simplifies the brain process,
in so far gives greater certainty to the results. For this reason
experiments on reflex actions are valuable and decisive where similar
experiments on voluntary actions are uncertain and of doubtful value.
Now the child's mind is relatively simple, and so offers a field for
more fruitful experiment; this is seen in the reactions of the infant
to strong stimuli, such as bright colours, etc., as related further
on.
With this inadequate review of the advantages of infant psychology, it
is well also to point out the dangers of the abuse of it. Such dangers
are real. The very simplicity which seems to characterize the life of
the child is often extremely misleading, and this because the
simplicity in question is sometimes ambiguous. Two actions of the
child may appear equally simple; but one may be an adaptive action,
learned with great pains and really very complex, while the other may
be inadaptive and really simple. Children differ under the law of
heredity very remarkably, even in the simplest manifestations of their
conscious lives. It is never safe to say without qualification: "This
child did, consequently all children must." The most we can usually
say in observing single children is: "This child did, consequently
another child may."
Speaking more positively, the following remarks may be useful to those
who have a mind to observe children:
1. In the first place, we can fix no absolute time in the history of
the child at which a certain mental process takes its rise. The
observations, now quite extensively recorded, and sometimes quoted as
showing that the first year, or the second year, etc., brings such and
such developments, tend, on the contrary, to show that such divisions
do not hold in any strict sense. Like any other organic growth, the
nervous system may develop faster under more favourable conditions, or
more slowly under less favourable; and the growth of the mind is
largely dependent upon the growth of the brain. Only in broad outline
and within very wide limits can such periods be marked off at all.
2. The possibility of the occurrence of a mental state at a particular
time must be distinguished from its necessity. The occurrence of a
single clearly observed fact is decisive only against the theory
according to which its occurrence under the given conditions may not
occur. For example, the very early adaptive movements of the infant in
receiving its food can not be due to intelligence and will; but the
case is still open as to the question what is the reason of their
presence--i.e., how much nervous development is present, how much
experience is necessary, etc. It is well to emphasize the fact that
one case may be decisive in overthrowing a theory, but the conditions
are seldom simple enough to make one case decisive in establishing a
theory.
3. It follows, however, from the principle of growth itself that the
order of development of the main mental functions is constant, and
normally free from great variations; consequently, the most fruitful
observations of children are those which show that such an act was
present _before another_. The complexity becomes finally so remarkable
that there seems to be no before or after at all in mental things; but
if the child's growth shows a stage in which any process is clearly
absent, we have at once light upon the laws of growth. For instance:
if a single case is conclusively established of a child's drawing an
inference before it begins to use words or significant vocal sounds,
the one case is as good as a thousand to show that thought may develop
in some degree independently of spoken language.
4. While the most direct results are acquired by systematic
experiments with a given point in view, still general observations
carefully recorded by competent persons, are important for the
interpretation which a great many such records may afford in the end.
In the multitude of experiences here, as everywhere, there is
strength. Such observations should cover everything about the
child--his movements, cries, impulses, sleep, dreams, personal
preferences, muscular efforts, attempts at expression, games,
favourites, etc.--and should be recorded in a regular daybook at the
time of occurrence. What is important and what is not, is, as I have
said, something to be learned; and it is extremely desirable that any
one contemplating such observations should acquaint himself beforehand
with the principles of general psychology and physiology, and should
seek also the practical advice of a trained observer.
As yet many of the observations which we have in this field were made
by the average mother, who knows less about the human body than she
does about the moon or the wild flowers, or by the average father, who
sees his child for an hour a day, when the boy is dressed up, and who
has never slept in the same room with him--let alone the same bed!--in
his life; by people who have never heard the distinction between
reflex and voluntary action, or that between nervous adaptation and
conscious choice. The difference between the average mother and the
good psychologist is this: she has no theories, he has; he has no
interests, she has. She may bring up a family of a dozen and not be
able to make a single trustworthy observation; he maybe able, from one
sound of one yearling, to confirm theories of the neurologist and
educator, which are momentous for the future training and welfare of
the child.
As for experimenting with children, only the psychologist should
undertake it. The connections between the body and the mind are so
close in infancy, the mere animal can do so much to ape reason, and
the child is so helpless under the leading of instinct, impulse, and
external necessity, that the task is excessively difficult--to say
nothing of the extreme delicacy and tenderness of the budding tendrils
of the mind. But others do experiment! Every time we send a child out
of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most
serious and alarming kind. He goes into the hands of a teacher who is
often not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but who is,
perchance, a machine for administering a single experiment to an
infinite variety of children. It is perfectly certain that a great
many of our children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their
mental and moral development in the school; but we can not be at all
sure that they would fare any better if they were taught at home! The
children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case,
that possibly a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight
and psychological information, would do them good.
_Methods of experimenting with Children._--In endeavouring to bring
such questions as the degree of memory, recognition, association,
etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable
embarrassment has always been experienced in understanding the child's
vocal and other responses. Of course, the only way a child's mind can
be studied is through its expressions, facial, lingual, vocal,
muscular; and the first question--i.e., What did the infant do? must
be followed by a second--i.e., What did his doing that mean? The
second question is, as I have said, the harder question, and the one
which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident, on the
surface, that the further away we get in the child's life from simple
inherited or reflex responses, the more complicated do the processes
become, and the greater becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and
arriving at a true picture of the real mental condition which lies
back of them.
To illustrate this confusion, I may cite one of the few problems which
psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the
determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the
different colours. The first series of experiments consisted in
showing the child various colours and requiring him to name them, the
results being expressed in percentages of correct answers to the whole
number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different
questions, and the results give absolutely no clew to their
separation. It involves:
1. The child's distinguishing different colours displayed
simultaneously before it, together with the complete development of
the eyes for colour sensation. 2. The child's ability to recognise or
identify a colour after having seen it once. 3. An association between
the child's colour seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by
which the proper name for the colours is brought up in his mind. 4.
Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various names of
the colours which he recognises; and there is the further
embarrassment, that any such process which involves association of
ideas, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that
speech is acquired long after objects and some colours are
distinguished, shows that results reached by this method have very
little value as far as the problem of the first perception of colours
is concerned.
That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of
confusion is shown by the fact that children recognise many words
which they can not readily pronounce. When this was realized, a
second phase in the development of the problem arose. A colour was
named, and then the child was required to pick out that colour. This
gave results different from those reached by the first method, blue
and red leading the list in correct answers by the first method, while
by this second method yellow led, and blue came near the end of the
list.
The further objection that colours might be distinguished before the
word names are learned, or that colour words might be interchanged or
confused by the child, gave rise to what we may call the third stage
in the statement of the problem. The method of "recognition" took the
place of the method of "naming." This consisted in showing to a child
a coloured disk, without naming it, and then asking him to pick out
the same colour from a number of coloured disks.
This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named
above. It is the usual method of testing for colour blindness, in
which, from defects of vision, certain colours can not be perceived at
all. It answers very well for colour blindness; for what we really
want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signal-man is whether he
can recognise a given signal when it is repeated; that is, does he
know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or
red? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question
in the matter--the real question of colour perception. It is quite
possible that a child might not recognise an isolated colour when he
could really very well distinguish the colours lying side by side. The
last question, then, is this: When does the child get the different
colour _Sensations_ (not recognitions), and in what order?
To solve this question it would seem that experiments should be made
upon younger children. The results described above were all secured
after the children had made considerable progress in learning to
speak.
To meet this requirement another method may be used which can be
applied to children less than a year old. The colours are shown, and
the child led to grasp after them. This method is of such a character
as to yield a series of experiments whose results are in terms of the
most fundamental movements of the infant; it can be easily and
pleasantly conducted; and it is of wide application. The child's hand
movements are nearly ideal in this respect. The hand reflects the
child's first feelings, and becomes the most mobile organ of his
volition, except his organs of speech. We find spontaneous arm and
hand movements, reflex movements, reaching-out movements, grasping
movements, imitative movements, manipulating movements, and voluntary
efforts--all these, in order, reflecting the development of the mind.
To illustrate this method, I may cite certain results reached by
myself on the questions of colour and distance perception, and
right-handedness in the child.
_Distance and Colour Perception._--I undertook at the beginning of my
child H.'s ninth month to experiment with her with a view to arriving
at the exact state of her colour perception, and also to investigate
her sense of distance. The arrangements consisted in this instance in
giving the infant a comfortable sitting posture, kept constant by a
band passing around her chest and fastened securely to the back of her
chair. Her arms were left bare and quite free in their movements.
Pieces of paper of different colours were exposed before her, at
varying distances, front, right, and left. This was regulated by a
framework, consisting of a horizontal rod graded in inches, projecting
from the back of the chair at a level with her shoulder and parallel
with her arm when extended straight forward, and carrying on it
another rod, also graded in inches, at right angles to the first. This
second rod was thus a horizontal line directly in front of the child,
parallel with a line connecting her shoulders, and so equally distant
for both hands. This second rod was made to slide upon the first, so
as to be adjusted at any desired distance from the child. On this
second rod the colours, etc., were placed in succession, the object
being to excite the child to reach for them. So far from being
distasteful to the infant, I found that, with pleasant suggestions
thrown about the experiments, the whole procedure gave her much
gratification, and the affair became one of her pleasant daily
occupations. After each sitting she was given a reward of some kind. I
give the results, both for colour and distance, of 217 experiments. Of
these 111 were with five colours and 106 with ordinary newspaper
(chosen as a relatively neutral object, which would have no colour
value and no association, to the infant).
_Colour._--The colours range themselves in the order of
attractiveness--blue, red, white, green, and brown. Disregarding
white, the difference between blue and red is very slight, compared
with that between any other two. This confirms the results of the
second method described above. Brown, to my child--as tested in this
way--seemed to be about as neutral as could well be. A similar
distaste for brown has been noticed by others. White, on the other
hand, was more attractive than green. I am sorry that my list did not
include yellow. The newspaper was, at reaching distance (9 to 10
inches) and a little more (up to 14 inches), as attractive as the
average of the colours, and even as much so as the red; but this is
probably due to the fact that the newspaper experiments came after a
good deal of practice in reaching after colours, and a more exact
association between the stimulus and its distance. At 15 inches and
over, the newspaper was refused in 93 per cent of the cases, while
blue was refused at that distance in only 75 per cent, and red in 83
per cent.
_Distance._--In regard to the question of distance, the child
persistently refused to reach for anything put 16 inches or more away
from her. At 15 inches she refused 91 per cent of all the cases, 90
per cent of the colour cases, and, as I have said, 93 per cent of the
newspaper cases. At nearer distances we find the remarkable uniformity
with which the safe-distance association works at this early age. At
14 inches only 14 per cent of all the cases were refused, and at 13
inches only about 7 per cent. There was a larger percentage of
refusals at 11 and 12 inches than at 13 and 14 inches, a result due to
the influence of the brown, which was refused consistently when more
than 10 inches away. The fact that there were no refusals to reach for
anything exposed within reaching distance (10 inches)--other
attractive objects being kept away--shows two things; (1) the very
fine estimation visually of the distance represented by the
arm-length; and (2) the great uniformity at this age of the phenomenon
of Motor Suggestion upon which this method of child study is based,
and which is referred to again below. In respect to the first point,
it will be remembered that the child does not begin to reach for
anything that it sees until about the fourth or sixth week; so it is
evident at what a remarkably fast rate those obscure factors of size,
perspective, light and shade, etc., which signify distance to the eye,
become associated with arm movements of reaching. This method, applied
with proper precautions, obviates many of the difficulties of the
others. There are certain requirements of proper procedure, however,
which should never be neglected by any one who experiments with young
children.
In the first place, the child is peculiarly susceptible to the appeals
of change, novelty, chance, or happy suggestion; and often the failure
to respond to a stimulus is due to distraction or to discomfort rather
than to lack of intrinsic interest. Again, fatigue is a matter of
considerable importance. In respect to fatigue, I should say that the
first signs of restlessness, or arbitrary loss of interest, in a
series of stimulations, is sufficient warning, and all attempts at
further experimenting should cease. Often the child is in a state of
indisposition, of trifling nervous irritability, etc.; this should be
detected beforehand, and then nothing should be undertaken. No series
longer than three trials should be attempted without changing the
child's position, resting its attention with a song, or a game, etc.,
and thus leading it fresh to its task again. Furthermore, no single
stimulus, as a colour, should be twice repeated without a change to
some other, since the child's eagerness or alertness is somewhat
satisfied by the first effort, and a new thing is necessary to bring
him out to full exercise again. After each effort or two the child
should be given the object reached for to hold or play with for a
moment; otherwise he grows to apprehend that the whole affair is a
case of "Tantalus." In all these matters very much depends upon the
knowledge and care of the experimenter, and his ability to keep the
child in a normal condition of pleasurable muscular exercise
throughout.
In performing colour experiments, several requirements would appear to
be necessary for exact results. Should not the colours chosen be equal
in purity, intensity, lustre, illumination, etc.? In reference to
these differences, I think only that degree of care need be exercised
which good comparative judgment provides. Colours of about equal
objective intensity, of no gloss, of relatively evident spectral
purity, under constant illumination--this is all that is required. The
variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned--such as
condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights,
etc.--are of greater influence than any of these more recondite
variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are
certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of
pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at
the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness if
the colours themselves are equally bright; and lustre may be ruled out
by using coloured wools or blotting-papers. The papers used in the
experiments given above were coloured blotting-papers. The omission of
yellow is due to the absence, in the neighbourhood, of a satisfactory
yellow paper.
The method now described may be further illustrated by the following
experiments on the use of the hands by the young child.
_The Origin of Right-handedness._--The question, "Why are we right or
left-handed?" has exercised the speculative ingenuity of many men. It
has come to the front anew in recent years, in view of the advances made
in the general physiology of the nervous system; and certainly we are
now in a better position to set the problem intelligently and to hope
for its solution. Hitherto the actual conditions of the rise of
"dextrality" in young children--as the general fact of uneven-handedness
may be called--have not been closely observed. It was to gain light,
therefore, upon the facts themselves that the experiments described in
the following pages were carried out.
My child H. was placed in a comfortable sitting posture, the arms left
bare and free in their movement, and allowed to reach for objects placed
before her in positions exactly determined and recorded by the simple
arrangement of sliding rods already described. The experiments took
place at the same hour daily, for a period extending from her fourth to
her tenth month. These experiments were planned with very great care and
with especial view to the testing of several hypotheses which, although
superficial to those who have studied physiology, yet constantly recur
in publications on this subject. Among these theories certain may be
mentioned with regard to which my experiments were conclusive. It has
frequently been held that a child's right-handedness arises from the
nurse's or mother's constant method of carrying it, the child's hand
which is left free being more exercised, and so becoming stronger. This
theory is ambiguous as regards both mother and child. The mother, if
right-handed, would carry the child on the left arm, in order to work
with the right arm. This I find an invariable tendency with myself and
with nurses and mothers whom I have observed. But this would leave the
child's left arm free, and so a right-handed mother would be found with
a left-handed child! Again, if the mother or nurse be left-handed, the
child would tend to be right-handed. Or if, as is the case in civilized
countries, nurses largely replace the mothers, it would be necessary
that most of the nurses be left-handed in order to make most of the
children right-handed. Now, none of these deductions are true. Further,
the child, as a matter of fact, holds on with both hands, however it is
itself held.
Another theory maintains that the development of right-handedness is
due to differences in weight of the two lateral halves of the body;
this tends to bring more strain on one side than the other, and to
give more exercise, and so more development, to that side. This
evidently assumes that children are not right or left-handed before
they learn to stand. This my results given below show to be false.
Again, we are told that infants get right-handed by being placed on
one side too much for sleep; this can be shown to have little force
also when the precaution is taken to place the child alternately on
its right and left sides for its sleeping periods.
In the case of the child H., certain precautions were carefully
enforced. She was never carried about in arms at all, never walked
with when crying or sleepless; she was frequently turned over in her
sleep; she was not allowed to balance herself on her feet until a
later period than that covered by the experiments. Thus the conditions
of the rise of the right-handed era were made as simple and uniform as
possible.
The experiments included, besides reaching for colours, a great many
of reaching for other objects, at longer and shorter distances, and in
unsymmetrical directions. I give some details of the results of the
experiments in which simple objects were used, extending over a period
of four months, from the fifth to the ninth in her life. The number of
experiments at each sitting varied from ten to forty, the position of
the child being reversed as to light from windows, position of
observation, etc., after half of each series.
No trace of preference for either hand was discernible during this
period; indeed, the neutrality was as complete as if it had been
arranged beforehand, or had followed the throwing of dice.
I then conceived the idea that possibly a severer distance test might
affect the result and show a marked preferential response by one hand
over the other. I accordingly continued to use a neutral stimulus, but
placed it from twelve to fifteen inches away from the child. This
resulted in very hard straining on her part, with all the signs of
physical effort (explosive breathing sounds resulting from the setting
of the larynx, rush of blood to the head, seen in the flushing of the
face, etc.). The number of experiments in each series was
intentionally made very small, from one to twelve, in order to avoid
fatigue.
The results were now very interesting. During the month ending June
15th the child showed no decided preference for either hand in
reaching straight before her within the easy reaching distance of ten
inches, but a slight balance in favour of the left hand; yet she was
right-handed to a marked degree during the same period as regards
movements which required effort or strain, such as grasping for
objects twelve to fifteen inches distant. For the greater distances,
the left hand was used in only five cases as against seventy-four
cases of the use of the right hand; and further, all these five cases
were twelve-inch distances, the left hand being used absolutely not at
all in the forty-five cases at longer distances.
In order to test this further, I varied the point of exposure of the
stimulus to the right or left, aiming thus to attract the hand on one
side or the other, and so to determine whether the growth of such a
preference was limited to experiences of convenience in reaching to
adjacent local objects, etc.
The deviation to the left in front of the body only called out the
right hand to greater exertion, while the left hand fell into still
greater disuse. This seems to show that "dextrality" is not derived
from the experience of the individual in using either hand
predominantly for reaching, grasping, holding, etc., within the
easiest range of that hand. The right hand intruded regularly upon the
domain of the left.
Proceeding upon the clew thus obtained, a clew which seems to suggest
that the hand preference is influenced by the stimulus to the eye, I
introduced hand observations into a series of experiments already
mentioned above on the same child's perception of the different
colours; thinking that the colour stimulus which represented the
strongest inducement to the child to reach might have the same effect
in determining the use of the right hand as the increased distance in
the experiments already described. This inference is proved to be
correct by the results.
It should be added that in all cases in which both hands were used
together, each hand was called out with evident independence of the
other, both about the same time, and both carried energetically to the
goal. In many other cases in which either right or left hand is given
in the results, the other hand also moved, but in a subordinate and
aimless way. There was a very marked difference between the use of
both hands in some cases, and of one hand followed by, or accompanied
by, the other in other cases. It was very rare that the second hand
did not thus follow or accompany the first; and this was extremely
marked in the violent reaching for which the right hand was mainly
used. This movement was almost invariably accompanied by an objectless
and fruitless symmetrical movement of the other hand.
The results of the entire series of experiments on the use of the
hands may be stated as follows, mainly in the words in which they were
summarily reported some time ago:
1. I found no continued preference for either hand as long as there
were no violent muscular exertions made (based on 2,187 systematic
experiments in cases of free movement of hands near the body--i. e.,
right hand, 577 cases; left hand, 568 cases--a difference of 9 cases;
both hands, 1,042 cases; the difference of 9 cases being too slight to
have any meaning); the period covered being from the child's sixth to
her tenth month inclusive.
2. Under the same conditions, the tendency to use both hands together
was about double the tendency to use either (seen from the number of
cases of the use of both hands in the figures given above).
3. A distinct preference for the right hand in violent efforts in
reaching became noticeable in the seventh and eighth months.
Experiments during the eighth month on this cue gave, in 80 cases,
right hand, 74 cases; left hand, 5 cases; both hands, 1 case. This was
true in two very distinct classes of cases: first, reaching for
objects, neutral as regards colour (newspaper, etc.), at more than the
reaching distance; and, second, reaching for bright colours at any
distance. Under the stimulus of bright colours, from 86 cases, 84 were
right-hand cases and 2 left-hand. Right-handedness had accordingly
developed under pressure of muscular effort in the sixth and seventh
months, and showed itself also under the influence of a strong colour
stimulus to the eye.
4. Up to this time the child had not learned to stand or to creep;
hence the development of one hand more than the other is not due to
differences in weight between the two longitudinal halves of the body.
As she had not learned to speak or to utter articulate sounds with
much distinctness, we may say also that right or left-handedness may
develop while the speech centres are not yet functioning. Further, the
right hand is carried over after objects on the left side, showing
that habit in reaching does not determine its use.
_Theoretical_.--Some interesting points arise in connection with the
interpretation of these facts. If it be true that the order of rise of
mental and physiological functions is constant, then for this question
the results obtained in the case of one child, if accurate, would hold
for others apart from any absolute time determination. We should
expect, therefore, that these results would be confirmed by
experiments on other children, and this is the only way their
correctness can be tested.
If, when tested, they should be found correct, they would be
sufficient answer to several of the theories of right-handedness
heretofore urged, as has been already remarked. The rise of the
phenomenon must be sought, therefore, in more deep-going facts of
physiology than such theories supply. Furthermore, if we go lower in
the animal scale than man, analogies for the kinds of experience which
are urged as reasons for right-handedness are not present; animals do
not carry their young, nor pat them to sleep, nor do animals shake
hands!
A full discussion would lead us to the conclusion that dextrality is
due to a difference in development in the two hemispheres of the
brain, that these differences are hereditary, and that they show
themselves toward the end of the first year.
It is a singular circumstance that right-handedness and speech are
controlled by the same hemisphere of the brain and from contiguous
areas. It would explain this--and at the same time it seems probable
from other considerations--if we found that right-handedness was first
used for expression before speech; and that speech has arisen from
the setting aside, for further development, of the area in the brain
first used for right-handedness. Musical expression has its seat in or
near the same lobe of the brain.
_The Child's Mental Development in General_.--The actual development
of the child, as observations from many sources indicate it, may be
sketched very briefly in its main outlines. It is probable that the
earliest consciousness is simply a mass of touch and muscular
sensations experienced in part before birth. Shortly after birth the
child begins to connect his impressions with one another and to show
Memory. But both memory and Association are very weak, and depend upon
intense stimulations, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. The
things which most effect him at these early stages are those which
bring him into conditions of sharp physical pain or give him acute
pleasure. Yet it is a remarkable fact that at birth the pain reflex is
wanting. His whole life up to about the fourth month turns upon his
organic and vegetative needs. At three months the young child will
forget his mother or nurse after a very few days. Attention begins to
arise about the end of the first quarter year, appearing first in
response to bright lights and loud sounds, and being for a
considerable time purely reflex, drawn here and there by the
successive impressions which the environment makes. With lights and
sounds, however, movements also attract the infant's attention very
early; and the passage from reflex attention to a sort of vague
interest seems to arise first in connection with the movements of the
persons about him. This interest goes on to develop very rapidly in
the second half year, in connection more particularly with the
movements which are associated with the child's own comfort and
discomfort. The association of muscular sensations with those of touch
and sight serves to give him his first clear indications of the
positions of his own members and of other objects. His discrimination
of what belongs to his own body is probably aided by so-called "double
touch"--the fact that when he touches his own body, as in touching his
foot with the hand, he has two sensations, one in the foot and the
other in the hand. This is not the case when he touches other objects,
and he soon learns the distinction, getting the outlines of his own
body marked out in a vague way. The learning of the localities on his
body which he can not see, however, lags far behind. The movements of
his limbs in active exploration, accompanied by sight, enables him to
build up his knowledge of the world about him. Learning this he soon
falls to "experimenting" with the things of space. Thus he begins to
find out how things fit together, and what their uses are.
On the side of his movements we find him going through a series of
remarkable adaptations to his environment. At the beginning his
movements are largely random discharges, or reflexes of an instinctive
character, such as sucking. Yet in the first month he shows the
beginning of adaptation to the suggestions of his daily life, the
first manifestations of acquired Habit. He learns when and how long he
is expected to sleep, when and how much to eat; he very soon finds out
the peculiar touch and vocal tones of this person or that, and acts
upon these distinctions. He gets to know the meaning of his food
bottle, to understand the routine movements of persons about the
room, and the results of violations of their order. His hat, wraps,
carriage, become in the first half year signals to him of the outdoor
excursion. He no longer bobs his head about when held erect, and
begins to control his natural processes. The remarkable thing about
all these adaptations is that they occur before the infant can in any
sense be said to have a Will; for, as has been said, the fibres of the
brain necessary to voluntary action--in the cortex of the
hemispheres--are not yet formed.
The realization of this extraordinary adaptiveness of the very young
child should save parents many an anxious day and sleepless night.
There is practically nothing more easy than to impress upon the child
whatever habits of daily--and nightly!--routine one wishes to give
him, if he be taken early enough. The only requirements are knowledge
of what is good for him, and then _inviolable regularity_ in
everything that concerns him. Under this treatment he will become as
"obstinate" in being "good" as the opposite so-called indulgent or
capricious treatment always make him in being "bad." There is no
reason whatever that he should be walked with or held, that he should
be taken up when he cries, that he should be trotted when he awakes,
or that he should have a light by night. Things like this are simply
bad habits for which the parents have themselves to thank. The child
adapts himself to his treatment, and it is his treatment that his
habits reflect.
During the second half-year--sooner or later in particular cases--the
child is ready to begin to imitate. Imitation is henceforth, for the
following few years, the most characteristic thing about his action.
He first imitates movements, later sounds, especially vocal sounds.
His imitations themselves also show progress, being at first what is
called "simple imitation" (repeating a distinction already spoken of
in the chapter on animals), as when the child lies in bed in the
morning and repeats the same sound over and over again. He hears his
own voice and imitates it. In this sort of imitation he simply allows
his instinct to reproduce what he hears without control or
interference from him. He does not improve, but goes on making the
same sounds with the same mistakes again and again. But a little later
he begins what is called "persistent imitation"--the "try-try-again,"
already spoken of--which is a very different thing. Persistent
imitation shows unmistakably the presence of will. The child is not
satisfied with simple imitation or mere repetition, whether it be good
or bad in its results. He now sees his errors and aims consciously to
improve. Note the child's struggles to speak a word right by imitation
of the pronunciation of others. And he succeeds. He gradually gets his
muscles under control by persistence in his try-try-again.
Then he goes further--about the beginning of his second year, usually.
He gets the idea that imitation is the way to learn, and turns all his
effort into imitations experimentally carried out. He is now ready to
learn most of the great processes of his later culture. Speech,
writing, this special accomplishment and that, are all learned by
experimental imitation.
The example of the child's trying to draw or write has already been
cited. He looks at the copy before him; sets all his muscles of hand
and arm into massive contraction; turns and twists his tongue, bends
his body, winds his legs together, holds his breath, and in every way
concentrates his energies upon the copying of the model. In all this
he is experimenting.
He produces a wealth of movements, from which, very gradually, as he
tries and tries again, the proper ones are selected out. These he
practises, and lets the superfluous ones fall away, until he secures
the requisite control over hand and arm. Or suppose a child
endeavouring, in the crudest fashion, to put a rubber on the end of a
pencil, after seeing some one else do it--just the sort of thing a
year-old child loves to imitate. What a chaos of ineffective
movements! But with repeated effort he gets nearer and nearer to it,
and finally succeeds.
On the side of action, two general principles have been formulated in
child psychology, both illustrated in the cases and experiments now
given: The one, Motor Suggestion, is, as we saw, a principle of
general psychology. Its importance to the child is that by it he forms
Habits, useful responses to his environment, and so saves himself many
sad blunders. The other principle is that of Imitation; by it the
child learns new things directly in the teeth of his habits. By
exercising in an excessive way what he has already learned through his
experimental imitations, he is continually modifying his habits and
making new adaptations. These two principles dominate the active life
of the adult man as well.
_Personality Suggestion._--A further set of facts may be cited to
illustrate the working of Suggestion, now in the sphere of the
receptive life. They are important as showing the child's progress in
learning the great features of personality.
One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its
responses to its environment is the tendency to recognise differences
of personality. It responds to what have been called Suggestions of
Personality. As early as the second month it distinguishes its
mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic
methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts
itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to
these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be
of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery
depends upon the presence of certain kinds of "personality
suggestion." It is quite a different thing from the child's behavior
toward things which are not persons. Things come to be, with some few
exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite,
more and more unimportant; things may be subordinated to regular
treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important,
as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of
movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the
most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice
comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its
expressions equal the person in all his attributes.
I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies
and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of
personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows
stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons--an uncertainty
aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of
treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of
quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of
expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the
"projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal
consciousness.
It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully
conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more
closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on
account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little
detail.
1. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is
_movement_. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady
attention are directed to moving things--a swaying curtain, a moving
light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things
soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the
things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that
brings him his bottle, movement that regulates the stages of his bath,
movement that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and
rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the
feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption
from pain, is this--movements come to succour him. Change in his
bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the
rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are
accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he
sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earliest reflection
in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this
stage his "personality suggestion" is a _pain-movement-pleasure_
state of mind; to this he reacts with a smile, and a crow, and a kick.
Undoubtedly this association gets some of its value from the other
similar one in which the movements are the infant's own. It is by
movements that he gets rid of pains and secures pleasures.
Many facts tend to bear out this position. My child cried in the dark
when I handled her, although I imitated the nurse's movements as
closely as possible. She tolerated a strange presence so long as it
remained quietly in its place; but let it move, and especially let it
usurp any of the pieces of movement-business of the nurse or mother,
and her protests were emphatic. The movements tended to bring the
strange elements of a new face into the vital association,
pain-movement-pleasure, and so to disturb its familiar course; this
constituted it a strange "personality."
It is astonishing, also, what new accidental elements may become parts
of this association. Part of a movement, a gesture, a peculiar habit
of the nurse, may become sufficient to give assurance of the welcome
presence and the pleasures which the presence brings. Two notes of my
song in the night stood for my presence to H., and no song from any
one else could replace it. A lighted match stopped the crying of E.
for food in her fourteenth week, although it was but a signal for a
process of food preparation lasting several minutes; and a simple
light never stopped her crying under any other circumstances.
2. With this first start in the sense of personality we find also the
beginning of the recognition of different personalities. It is
evident that the sense of another's presence thus felt in the infant's
consciousness rests, as all associations rest, upon regularity or
repetition; his sense of expectancy is aroused whenever the chain of
events is started. This is soon embodied largely in two indications:
the face and the voice. But it is easy to see that this is a very
meagre sense of personality; a moving machine which brought pain and
alleviated suffering might serve as well. So the child begins to
learn, in addition, the fact that persons are in a measure individual
in their treatment of him; that their individuality has elements of
uncertainty or _irregularity_ about it. This growing sense is very
clear to one who watches an infant in its second half year. Sometimes
its mother gives it a biscuit, but sometimes she does not. Sometimes
the father smiles and tosses the child; sometimes he does not. Even
the indulgence of the grandmother has its times and seasons. The child
looks for signs of these varying moods and methods of treatment; for
his pains of disappointment arise directly on the basis of that former
sense of regular personal presence upon which his expectancy goes
forth.
This new element of the child's sense of persons becomes, at one
period of its development, quite the controlling element. His action
in the presence of the persons of the household becomes hesitating and
watchful. Especially does he watch the face, for any expressive
indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression
is now the most regular as well as the most delicate indication.
Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression
up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle sensibility to
these differences; and normal children all do. Animals are also very
expert at this.
All through the child's second year, and longer, his sense of the
persons around him is in this stage. The incessant "why?" with which
he greets any action affecting him, or any information given him, is
witness to the simple puzzle of the apparent capriciousness of
persons. Of course he can not understand "why"; so the simple fact to
him is that mamma will or won't, he knows not beforehand which. He is
unable to anticipate the treatment in detail, and he has not of course
learned any principles of interpretation of the conduct of father or
mother lying back of the details.
But in all this period there is germinating in his consciousness--and this
very uncertainty is an important element of it--the seed of a far-reaching
thought. His sense of persons--moving, pleasure-or-pain-giving, uncertain
but self-directing persons--is now to become a sense of agency, of power,
which is yet not the power of the regular-moving door on its hinges or the
rhythmic swinging of the pendulum of the clock. The sense of _personal
agency_ is now forming, and it again is potent for still further
development of the social consciousness. It is just here, I think, that
imitation becomes so important in the child's life. This is imitation's
opportunity. The infant watches to see how others act, because his own
weal and woe depends upon this "how"; and inasmuch as he knows not what to
anticipate, his mind is open to every suggestion of movement. So he falls
to imitating. His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of
adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for
himself.
It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to
grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes.
Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets
the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes
"contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard,
and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality.
For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be
capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.
3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the
persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in
spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of
personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence
and another, so now he learns the difference between one _character_
and another. Every character is more or less regular in its
irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament
and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and
thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He
is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud,
pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no
adult is present who has authority or will to punish him. This stage
in his "knowledge of man" leads to very marked differences of conduct
on his part.
4. He now goes on to acquire real _self-consciousness_ and _social
feeling_. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate
heading below.
It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about
Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which
the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four
roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called
the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare
distinction _of persons from things_ on the ground of peculiar
pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or
capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests
_personal agency_. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but
wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of
behaviour or _personal characters_ of different persons. 4. After his
sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, he gets
what is really _self-consciousness_ and _social feeling_.
[Footnote 2: It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we
find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is
curious to note that, besides the general gregariousness which many
animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the
presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem
to recognise dogs by _smell_. So with cats, which also respond
instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem
to be guided by _sight_. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of
fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.]
_Self-consciousness._--So far as we have now gone the child has only a
very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons
who move about him. The persons are "projective" to him, mere bodies
or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they
show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun,
as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes
about from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of
others.
Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others, he finds himself
gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same
actions with them, to discover what they are feeling, what their
motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees
his father handle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks
himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the
child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the
child's curiosity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes
up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that
his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the
impulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now
discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive
of the action.
This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which
many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the
development of the child; and because of this twofold significance it
is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the
opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social
philosophy.
1. By such imitation the child learns to associate his own sense of
physical power, together with his own private pleasures and pains,
with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in
other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become
his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be
characteristic of the persons of his social circle, become his, in
his own thought. He is now _for himself_ an agent who has the marks of
a Person or a Self. He now understands _from_ _the inside_ all the
various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer
"projective"--simply there, outside, in the environment; it has become
what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together
by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles.
This is what we mean by Self-consciousness. It is not an inborn thing
with the child. He gradually acquires it. And it is not a sense of a
distinct and separate self, first known and then compared with other
persons. On the contrary, it is gradually built up in the child's mind
from the same material exactly as that of which he makes up his
thought of other persons. The deeds he can do he first sees others
doing; only then can he imitate them and find out that he also is a
being who can perform them.
So it goes all through our lives. Our sense of Self is constantly
changing, constantly being enriched. We have not the same thought of
self two days in succession. To-day I think of myself as something to
be proud of, to-morrow as something to be ashamed of. To-day I learn
something from you, and the thought that it is common to you and to me
is the basis of my sympathy with you. To-morrow I learn to commit the
unworthy act which Mr. A. commits, and the thought that he and I are
so far the same is the basis of the common disapproval which I feel of
him and me.
2. The second result of this imitative learning about personality is
of equal importance. When the child has taken up an action by
imitation and made it subjective, finding out that personality has an
inside, something more than the mere physical body, then he reads this
fact back into the other persons also. He says to himself: "He too, my
little brother, must have _in him_ a sense of agency similar to this
of mine. He acts imitatively, too; he has pleasures and pains; he
shows sympathy for me, just as I do for him. So do all the persons
with whom I have become so far acquainted. They are, then, 'subjects'
as I am--something richer than the mere 'projects' which I had
supposed." So other persons become essentially like himself; and not
only like himself, but identical with himself so far as the particular
marks are concerned which he has learned from them. For it will be
remembered that all these marks were at first actually taken up by
imitation from these very persons. The child is now giving back to his
parents, teachers, etc., only the material which he himself took from
them. He has enriched it, to be sure; with it he now reads into the
other persons the great fact of subjective agency; but still whatever
he thinks of them has come by way of his thought of himself, and that
in turn was made up from them.
This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the
self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when
they speak of the "ejective" self. It is the self of some one else as
I think of it; in other words, it is myself "ejected" out by me and
lodged in him.
_The Social and Ethical Sense._--From this we see what the Social
Sense is. It is the feeling which arises in the child or man of the
real identity, through its imitative origin, of all possible thoughts
of self, whether yourself, myself, or some one else's self. The bond
between you and me is not an artificial one; it is as natural as is
the recognition of personal individuality. And it is doing violence to
this fundamental fact to say, as social science so often assumes, that
the individual naturally separates himself or his interests from the
self or the interests of others. He is, on the contrary, bound up with
others from the start by the very laws of his growth. His social
action and feeling are natural to him. The child can not be selfish
only nor generous only; he may seem to be this or that, in this
circumstance or that, but he is really social all the time.
Furthermore, his sense of right and wrong, his Ethical Sense, grows up
upon this sense of the social bond. This I can not stop to explain
further. But it is only when social relationships are recognised as
essential in the child's growth that we can understand the mutual
obligations and duties which the moral life imposes upon us all.
_How to Observe Children, with Especial Reference to Observations of
Imitation._--There are one or two considerations of such practical
importance to all those who wish to observe children that I venture to
throw them together--only saying, by way of introduction, that nothing
less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter
of its imitations. The Self is really the form in which the personal
influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality.
1. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by
a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected
the child. This is the more important since the child sees few
persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely--it is
inevitable--that he _make up his personality_, under limitations of
heredity, by imitation, out of the "copy" set in the actions, temper,
emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of
his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to
see what members of the family are giving him his personal "copy"--to
find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom;
whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree
their dispositions are; whether he is growing to be a person of
subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the
elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign
nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure
in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole system of
influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his
sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating;
and habits?--they are character!
2. A point akin to the first is this: the observation of each child
should describe with great accuracy the child's relations to other
children. Has he brothers or sisters? how many of each, and of what
age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play
much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child
has only adult "copy." He can not interpret his father's actions, or
his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more
childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this
difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks
the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a
direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he
becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety
of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his
imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his
sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great
mistake to isolate children, especially to separate off one or two
children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to
the other element of social danger which I may mention next.
3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually
close relationship between children in youth, such as childish
favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home,
etc. We have in these facts--and there is a very great variety of
them--an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing
down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed
influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis
of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure,
teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and
students to room together; but that has been with view to the
possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is
certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as
teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that.
Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and
roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of
what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl
whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new
environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self--her
very personality; it is nothing less than that--utterly new channels
of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the
lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the
structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the
greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she
is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in
the morning, with one other person, a "copy" set before her, as
immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single
personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining
cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers,
mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room! They need all that
they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them
plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the
soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life
itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of
the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative
hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and
depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social
continence. So impressively true is this from the human point of view
that, in my opinion--formed, it is true, from the very few data
accessible on such points, still a positive opinion--friendships of a
close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when
under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when
allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain
the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social
exercise.
One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools
of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the
independence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is
self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the
best discipline.
4. The remainder of this section may be devoted to the further
emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games,
especially those which may be best described as "society games." All
those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the
nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary facility of the
child's mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting
social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however,
to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they
were observing in these fancy plays the putting together anew of
fragments, or larger pieces, of the adult's mental history. Here, in
these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the
personal "copy" material which they get from you and me. If a man
study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out,
he gradually sees emerge from within the inner consciousness a picture
of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions
he seeks to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child
takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele
pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster
divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming
point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than
of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets.
Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the
pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the
fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming
personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is
simply left to take its course for the further establishing and
confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did
not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for
one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there
ever a child who did not play "church," and force the improvised
"papa" into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy"
things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, after they
had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this:
the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes
upon himself the scenes of the parent's life and acts them out; so he
grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to
perform.
In order to be of more direct service to observers of games of this
character, let me give a short account of an observation of the kind
made some time ago--one of the simplest of many actual situations
which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out
together. It is a very commonplace case, a game the elements of which
are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more
complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find
the elementary the more instructive.
On May 2 I was sitting on the porch alone with the children--the two
mentioned above, aged respectively four and a half and two and a half
years. Helen, the elder, told Elizabeth that she was her little baby;
that is, Helen became "mamma," and Elizabeth the "baby." The younger
responded by calling her sister "mamma," and the play began.
"You have been asleep, baby. Now it is time to get up," said mamma.
Baby rose from the floor--first falling down in order to rise!--was
seized upon by "mamma," taken to the railing to an imaginary
washstand, and her face washed by rubbing. Her articles of clothing
were then named in imagination, and put on, one by one, in the most
detailed and interesting fashion. During all this "mamma" kept up a
stream of baby talk to her infant: "Now your stockings, my darling;
now your skirt, sweetness--O! no--not yet--your shoes first," etc.,
etc. Baby acceded to all the details with more than the docility which
real infants usually show. When this was done--"Now we must go tell
papa good-morning, dearie," said mamma. "Yes, mamma," came the reply;
and hand in hand they started to find papa. I, the spectator,
carefully read my newspaper, thinking, however, that the reality of
papa, seeing that he was so much in evidence, would break in upon the
imagined situation. But not so. Mamma led her baby directly past me to
the end of the piazza, to a column in the corner. "There's papa," said
mamma; "now tell him good-morning."--"Good-morning, papa; I am very
well," said baby, bowing low to the column. "That's good," said mamma,
in a _gruff, low voice_, which caused in the real papa a thrill of
amused self-consciousness most difficult to contain. "Now you must
have your breakfast," said mamma. The seat of a chair was made a
breakfast table, the baby's feigned bib put on, and her porridge
carefully administered, with all the manner of the nurse who usually
directs their breakfast. "Now" (after the meal, which suddenly became
dinner instead of breakfast), "you must take your nap," said mamma.
"No, mamma; I don't want to," said baby. "But you must."--"No; you be
baby, and take the nap."--"But all the other children have gone to
sleep, dearest, _and the doctor says you must_," said mamma. This
convinced baby, and she lay down on the floor. "But I haven't
undressed you." So then came all the detail of undressing; and mamma
carefully covered her up on the floor with a light shawl, saying:
"Spring is coming now; that'll be enough. Now shut your eyes, and go
to sleep."--"But you haven't kissed me, mamma," said the little one.
"Oh, of course, my darling!"--so a long siege of kissing! Then baby
closed her eyes very tight, while mamma went on tiptoe away to the end
of the porch. "Don't go away, mamma," said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't
leave her darling," came the reply.
So this went on. The nap over, a walk was proposed, hats put on, etc.,
the mamma exercising great care and solicitude for her baby. One
further incident to show this: when the baby's hat was put on--the
real hat--mamma tied the strings rather tight. "Oh! you hurt, mamma,"
said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't draw the strings too tight. Let mamma
kiss it. There, is that better, my darling?"--all comically true to a
certain sweet maternal tenderness which I had no difficulty in
tracing.
Now in such a case what is to be reported, of course, is the facts.
Yet knowledge of more than the facts is necessary, as I have said
above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the
information which concerns the rest of the family and the social
influences of the children's lives. I recognised at once every phrase
which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant
in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in
this process, called in a figure "social heredity." But as that story
is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's
social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and
personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this
true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the
brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake
four-year-old?
Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons
even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a
more direct lesson--a lived-out exercise--in sympathy, in altruistic
self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the
dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency,
in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to
ends--and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is
quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we
personate other characters? What could further all this highest mental
growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily
life are read into the child's little self? Then, in the case of
Elizabeth also, certain things appear. She obeys without command or
sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal
suggestion in their simpler childish forms. Certainly such scenes,
repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something
of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward
confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are
learned by the same process.
All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty
also. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or
possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the
attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its
distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this
sort of symbolic representation. Play has its dangers also--very
serious ones. The adults sometimes set bad examples. The game gives
practise in cunning no less than in forbearance. Possibly the best
service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to
the proper recognition and avoidance of the dangers.
Finally, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of
no use whatever to psychologists--to say nothing of the actual damage
you may be to the children--unless you _know your babies through and
through_. Especially the fathers! They are willing to study everything
else. They know every corner of the house familiarly, and what is done
in it, except the nursery. A man labours for his children ten hours a
day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet
he lets their mental growth, the formation of their characters, the
evolution of their personality, go on by absorption--if no worse--from
common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral attendants! Plato
said the state should train the children; and added that the wisest
man should rule the state. This is to say that the wisest man should
tend his children! Hugo gives us, in Jean Valjean and Cosette, a
picture of the true paternal relationship. We hear a certain group of
studies called the _humanities_, and it is right. But the best school
in the humanities for every man is in his own house.
With this goes, finally, the highest lesson of sport, drama,
make-believe, even when we trace it up into the art-impulse--the
lesson of _personal freedom_. The child himself sets the limitations
of the game, makes the rules, and subjects himself to them, and then
in time pierces the bubble for himself, saying, "I will play no more."
All this is the germ of self-regulation, of the control of the
impulses, of the voluntary adoption of the ideal, which becomes in
later life--if so be that he cling to it--the pearl of great price.
CHAPTER V.
THE CONNECTION OF BODY WITH MIND--PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY--MENTAL
DISEASES.
In the foregoing pages we have had intimations of some of the
important questions which arise about the connection of mind with
body. The avenues of the senses are the normal approaches to the mind
through the body; and, taking advantage of this, experiments are made
upon the senses. This gives rise to Experimental Psychology, to which
the chapter after this is devoted. Besides this, however, we find the
general fact that a normal body must in all cases be present with a
normal mind, and this makes it possible to arrange so to manipulate
the body that changes may be produced in the mind in other ways than
through the regular channels of sense. For example, we influence the
mind when we drink too much tea or coffee, not to mention the greater
changes of the same kind which are produced in the mind of the drinker
of too much alcohol or other poisonous substances. All the methodical
means of procedure by which the psychologist produces effects of this
kind by changing the condition or functions of the body within itself
belong to Physiological Psychology. So he modifies the respiration,
changes the heart beat, stimulates or slows the circulation of the
blood, paralyzes the muscles, etc. The ways of procedure may be
classified under a few heads, each called a method.
1. _Method of Extirpation._--This means simply the cutting away of a
part of the body, so that any effect which the loss of the part makes
upon the mind may be noted. It is used especially upon the brain.
Pieces of the brain, great or small--indeed, practically the whole
brain mass--may be removed in many animals without destroying life.
Either of the cerebral hemispheres entire, together with large
portions of the other, may be taken from the human brain without much
effect upon the vital processes, considered as a whole; the actual
results being the loss of certain mental functions, such as sight,
hearing, power of movement of particular limbs, etc., according to the
location of the part which is removed. Many of the facts given below
under the heading of Localization were discovered in this way, the
guiding principle being that if the loss of a function follows the
removal of a certain piece of the brain, then that portion of the
brain is directly concerned in the healthy performance of that
function.
2. _Method of Artificial Stimulation._--As the term indicates, this
method proceeds by finding some sort of agent by which the
physiological processes may be started artificially; that is, without
the usual normal starting of these processes. For example, the
physician who stimulates the heart by giving digitalis pursues this
method. For psychological purposes this method has also been fruitful
in studying the brain, and electricity is the agent customarily used.
The brain is laid bare by removing part of the skull of the animal,
and the two electrodes of a battery are placed upon a particular point
of the brain whose function it is wished to determine. The current
passes out along the nerves which are normally set in action from this
particular region, and movements of the muscles follow in certain
definite parts and directions. This is an indication of the normal
function of the part of the brain which is stimulated.
Besides this method of procedure a new one, also by brain stimulation,
has recently been employed. It consists in stimulating a spot of the
brain as before, but instead of observing the character of the
movement which follows, the observer places galvanometers in
connection with various members of the body and observes in which of
the galvanometers the current comes out of the animal's body (the
galvanometer being a very delicate instrument for indicating the
presence of an electric current). In this way it is determined along
what pathways and to what organs the ordinary vital stimulation passes
from the brain, provided it be granted that the electric current takes
the same course.
3. _Method of Intoxication, called the "Toxic Method._"--The remarks
above may suffice for a description of this method. The results of the
administration of toxic or poisonous agents upon the mind are so
general and serious in their character, as readers of De Quincy know,
that very little precise knowledge has been acquired by their use.
4. _Method of Degeneration._--This consists in observing the progress
of natural or artificially produced disease or damage to the tissues,
mainly the nervous tissues, with a view to discovering the directions
of pathways and the locations of connected functions. The degeneration
or decay following disease or injury follows the path of normal
physiological action, and so discloses it to the observer. This method
is of importance to psychology as affording a means of locating and
following up the course of a brain injury which accompanies this or
that mental disease or defect.
_Results_--_Localization of Brain Functions._--The more detailed
results of this sort of study, when considered on the side of the
nervous organism, may be thrown together under the general head of
Localization. The greatest result of all is just the discovery that
there is such a thing as localization in the nervous system of the
different mental functions of sensation and movement. We find
particular parts of the nervous organism contributing each its share,
in a more or less independent way, to the whole flow of the mental
life; and in cases of injury or removal of this part or that, there
is a corresponding impairment of the mind.
First of all, it is found that the nervous system has a certain
up-and-down arrangement from the segments of the spinal cord up to the
gray matter of the rind or "cortex" of the large masses or hemispheres
in the skull, to which the word brain is popularly applied. This
up-and-down arrangement shows three so-called "levels" of function.
Beginning with the spinal cord, we find the simplest processes, and
they grow more complex as we go up toward the brain.
The lowest, or "third level," includes all the functions which the
spinal cord, and its upper termination, called the "medulla," are able
to perform alone--that is, without involving necessarily the activity
of the nervous centres and brain areas which lie above them. Such
"third-level" functions are those of the life-sustaining processes
generally: breathing, heart-beat, vasomotor action (securing the
circulation of the blood), etc. These are all called Automatic
processes. They go regularly on from day to day, being constantly
stimulated by the normal changes in the physiological system itself,
and having no need of interference from the mind of the individual.
In addition to the automatic functions, there is a second great class
of processes which are also managed from the third level; that is, by
the discharge of nervous energy from particular parts of the spinal
cord. These are the so-called Reflex functions. They include all those
responses which the nervous system makes to stimulations from the
outside, in which the mind has no alternative or control. They happen
whether or no. For example, when an object comes near the eye the lid
flies to reflexly. If a tap be made upon the knee while one sits with
the legs crossed the foot flies up reflexly. Various reflexes may be
brought out in a sleeper by slight stimulations to this or that region
of his body. Furthermore, each of the senses has its own set of reflex
adjustments to the stimulations which come to it. The eye accommodates
itself in the most delicate way to the intensity of the light, the
distance of the object, the degree of elevation, and the angular
displacement of what one looks at. The taking of food into the mouth
sets up all sorts of reflex movements which do not cease until the
food is safely lodged in the stomach, and so on through a series of
physiological adaptations which are simply marvellous in their variety
and extent. These processes belong to the third level; and it may
surprise the uninitiated to know that not only is the mind quite "out
of it" so far as these functions are concerned, but that the brain
proper is "out of it" also. Most of these reflexes not only go on when
the brain is removed from the skull, but it is an interesting detail
that they are generally exaggerated under these conditions. This shows
that while the third or lowest level does its own work, it is yet in a
sense under the weight--what physiologists call the inhibiting
action--of the higher brain masses. It is not allowed to magnify its
part too much, nor to work out of its proper time and measure. The
nervous apparatus involved in these "third-level" functions may be
called the "reflex circuit" (see Fig. 2), the path being from the
sense organ up to the centre by a "sensory" nerve, and then out by a
"motor" nerve to the muscle.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--_s c mt_ = reflex circuit; _s c sp mp c mt_ =
voluntary circuit.]
Going upward in the nervous system, we next find a certain group of
bodies within the gross mass of the brain, certain centres lying
between the hemispheres above and the medulla and spinal cord below,
and in direct connection by nervous tracts with both of these. The
technical names of the more important of these organs are these: the
"corpora striata," or striped bodies, of which there are two, the
"optic thalami," also two in number, and the "cerebellum" or little
brain, situated behind. These make up what is called the "second
level" in the system. They seem to be especially concerned with the
life of sensation. When the centres lying above them, the hemispheres,
are removed, the animal is still able to see, hear, etc., and still
able to carry out his well-knit habits of action in response to what
he sees and hears. But that is about all. A bird treated thus, for
example, these second-level centres being still intact while the
hemispheres are removed, retains his normal appearance, being quite
able to stand upon his feet, to fly, walk, etc. His reflexes are also
unimpaired and his inner physiological processes; but it soon becomes
noticeable that his mental operations are limited very largely to
sensations. He sees his food as usual, but does not remember its use,
and makes no attempt to eat it. He sees other birds, but does not
respond to their advances. He seems to have forgotten all his
education, to have lost all the meanings of things, to have
practically no intelligence. A dog in this condition no longer fears
the whip, no longer responds to his name, no longer steals food. On
the side of his conduct we find that all the actions which he had
learned by training now disappear; the trick dog loses all his tricks.
What was called Apperception in the earlier chapter seems to have been
taken away with the hemispheres.
Coming to the "first level," the highest of all, both in anatomical
position and in the character of the functions over which it presides,
we see at once what extraordinary importance it has. It comprises the
cortex of the hemispheres, which taken together are called the
cerebrum. It consists of the parts which we supposed cut out of the
pigeon and dog just mentioned; and when we remember what these animals
lose by its removal, we see what the normal animal or man owes to the
integrity of this organ. It is above all the organ of mind. If we had
to say that the mind as such is located anywhere, we should say in the
gray matter of the cortex of the hemispheres of the brain. For
although, as we saw, animals without this organ can still see and hear
and feel, yet we also saw that they could do little else and could
learn to do nothing more. All the higher operations of mind come back
only when we think of the animal as having normal brain hemispheres.
Further, we find this organ in some degree duplicating the function of
the second-level centres, for fibres go out from these intermediate
masses to certain areas of the hemispheres, which reproduce locally
the senses of hearing, sight, etc. By these fibres the functions of
the senses are "projected" out to the surface of the brain, and the
term "projection fibres" is applied to the nerves which make these
connections. The hemispheres are not content even with the most
important of all functions--the strictly intelligent--but they are
jealous, so to speak, of the simple sensations which the central brain
masses are capable of awaking. And in the very highest animals,
probably only monkeys and man, we find that the hemispheres have gone
so far with their jealousy as to usurp the function of sensation. This
is seen in the singular fact that with a monkey or man the removal of
the cortical centres makes the animal permanently blind or deaf, as
the case may be, while in the lower animals such removal does not have
this result, so long as the "second-level" organs are unimpaired. The
brain paths of the functions of the second and first levels taken
together constitute the so-called "voluntary circuit" (see Fig. 2).
In addition to this general demarcation of functions as higher and
lower--first, second, and third level--in their anatomical seat, many
interesting discoveries have been made in the localization of the
simpler functions in the cortex itself. The accompanying figures
(Figs. 3 and 4) will show the principle centres which have been
determined; and it is not necessary to dwell upon additional details
which are still under discussion. The areas marked out are in general
the same on both hemispheres, and that is to say that most of the
centres are duplicated. The speech centres, however, are on one side
only. And in certain cases the nervous fibres which connect the cortex
with the body-organs cross below the brain to the opposite side of the
body. This is always true in cases of muscular movement; the movements
of the right side of the body are controlled by the left hemisphere,
and _vice versa_. The stimulations coming in from the body to the
brain generally travel on the same side, although in certain cases
parallel impulses are also sent over to the other hemisphere as well.
For example, the very important optic nerve, which is necessary to
vision, comes from each eye separately in a large bunch of fibres, and
divides at the base of the brain, so that each eye sends impulses
directly to the visual centres of both hemispheres.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Outer surface of left hemisphere of the brain
(modified from Exner): _a_, fissure of Rolando; _b_, fissure of
Sylvius.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Inner (mesial) surface of the right hemisphere
of the brain (modified from Schäfer and Horsley). In both figures the
shaded area is the motor zone.]
Of all the special questions which have arisen about the localization
of functions in the nervous system, that of the function of certain
areas known as "motor centres" has been eagerly discussed. The region
on both sides of the fissure of Rolando in Fig. 3 contains a number of
areas which give, when stimulated with electricity, very definite and
regular movements of certain muscles on the opposite side of the body.
By careful exploration of these areas the principal muscular
combinations--those for facial movements, neck movements, movements of
the arm, trunk, legs, tail, etc.--have been very precisely
ascertained. It was concluded from these facts that these areas were
respectively the centres for the discharge of the nervous impulses
running in each case to the muscles which were moved. The evidence
recently forthcoming, however, is leading investigators to think that
there is no cortical centre for the "motor" or outgoing processes
properly so called, and that these Rolandic areas, although called
"motor," are really centres for the incoming reports of the movements
of the respective muscles after the movements take place, and also for
the preservation of the memories of movement which the mind must have
before a particular movement can be brought about (the mental images
of movement which we called on an earlier page Kinæsthetic
Equivalents). These centres being aroused in the thought of the
movement desired, which is the necessary mental preparation for the
movement, they in turn stimulate the real motor centres which lie
below the cortex at the second level. This is in the present writer's
judgment the preferable interpretation of the evidence which we now
have.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--The speech zone (after Collins).]
_The Speech Zone._--Many interesting facts of the relation of body and
mind have come to light in connection with the speech functions.
Speech is complex, both on the psychological and also on the
physiological side, and easily deranged in ways that take on such
remarkable variety that they are a source of very fruitful indications
to the inquirer. It is now proved that speech is not a faculty, a
single definite capacity which a man either has or has not. It is
rather a complex thing resulting from the combined action of many
brain centres, and, on the mental side, of many so-called faculties,
or functions. In order to speak a man normally requires what is called
a "zone" in his brain, occupying a large portion of the outside
lateral region (see Fig. 5). It extends, as in the figure, from the
Rolandic region (_K_), where the kinæsthetic lip-and-tongue memories
of words are aroused, backward into the temporal region (_A_), where
the auditory memories of words spring up; then upward to the angular
gyrus in the rear or occipital region (_V_), where in turn the visual
pictures of the written or printed words rise to perform their part in
the performance; and with all this combination there is associated the
centre for the movements of the hand and arm employed in writing, an
area higher up in the Rolandic region (above _K_). In the same general
zone we also find the music function located, the musical sounds being
received in the auditory centre very near the area for words heard
(_A_) while the centre for musical expression is also in the Rolandic
region. Furthermore, as may be surmised, the reading of musical
notation requires the visual centre, just as does the reading of
words. In addition to this, we find the curious fact that the location
of the whole speech zone is in one hemisphere only. Its location on
the left or the right, in particular cases, is also an indication as
to whether the person is right-or left-handed; this means that the
process which makes the individual either right or left-handed is
probably located in the speech zone, or near it. A large majority of
persons have the speech zone in the left hemisphere, and are
right-handed; it will be seen that the figure (5) shows the left
hemisphere of the brain, and with it the right hand holding the pen.
_Defects of Speech--Aphasia._--The sorts of injury which may befall a
large zone of the brain are so many that well-nigh endless forms of
speech defect occur. All impairment of speech is called Aphasia, and
it is called Motor Aphasia when the apparatus is damaged on the side
of movement.
If the fibres coming out from the speech zone be impaired, so that the
impulses can not go to the muscles of articulation and breathing, we
have Subcortical Motor Aphasia. Its peculiarity is that the person
knows perfectly what he wants to say, but yet can not speak the words.
He is able to read silently, can understand the speech of others, and
can remember music; but, with his inability to speak, he is generally
also unable to write or to perform on a musical instrument (yet this
last is not always the case). Then we find new variations if his
"lesion"--as all kinds of local nervous defects are called--is in the
brain centre in the Rolandic region, where arise the memories of the
movements required. In this latter case the aphasic patient can
readily imitate speech so long as he hears it, can imitate writing so
long as it lies before him, but can not do any independent speaking or
writing for himself. With this there goes another fact which
characterizes this form of aphasia, and which is called Cortical, as
opposed to the Subcortical Motor Aphasia described above, that the
person may not be able even to think of the words which are
appropriate to express his meaning. This is the case when those
persons who depend upon the memories of the movements of lip and
tongue in their normal speech are injured as described.
Besides the two forms of Motor Aphasia now spoken of, there are
certain other speech defects which are called Sensory Aphasia. When a
lesion occurs in one of the areas of the brain in the speech zone in
which the requisite memories of words seen or heard have their
seat--as when a ball player is struck over the sight centre in the
back of the head--special forms of sensory aphasia show themselves.
The ball player will, in this case, have Visual Aphasia, being unable
to speak in proportion as he is accustomed in his speaking to depend
upon the images of written or printed words. He is quite unable to
read or write from a copy which he sees; but he may be able,
nevertheless, to write from dictation, and also to repeat words which
are spoken to him. This is because in these latter performances he
uses his auditory centre, and not the visual. There are, indeed, some
persons who are so independent of vision that the loss of the visual
centre does not much impair their normal speech.
When, again, an injury comes to the auditory centre in the temporal
region, we find the converse of the case just described; the defect is
then called Auditory Aphasia. The patient can not now speak or write
words which he hears, and can not speak spontaneously in proportion as
he is accustomed to depend upon his memories of the word sounds. But
in most cases he can still both speak and write printed or written
words which he sees before him.
These cases may serve to give the reader an idea of the remarkable
delicacy and complexity of the function of speech. It becomes more
evident when, instead of cases of gross lesion, which destroy a whole
centre, or cut the connections between centres, we have disease of the
brain which merely destroys a few cells in the gray matter here or
there. We then find partial loss of speech, such as is seen in
patients who lack only certain classes of words; perhaps the verbs, or
the conjunctions, or proper names, etc.; or in the patients who
speak, but yet do not say what they mean; or, again, in persons who
have two verbal series going on at once, one of which they can not
control, and which they often attribute to an enemy inside them, in
control of the vocal organs, or to a persecutor outside whose abuse
they can not avoid hearing. In cases of violent sick headache we often
miscall objects without detecting it ourselves, and in delirium the
speech mechanism works from violent organic discharges altogether
without control. The senile old man talks nonsense--so-called
gibberish--thinking he is discoursing properly.
In the main cases of Aphasia of distinct sensory and motor types
psychological analysis is now so adequate and the anatomical
localization so far advanced that the physicians have sufficient basis
for their diagnosis, and make inferences looking toward treatment.
Many cases of tumour, of clot on the brain, of local pressure from the
skull, and of hæmorrhage or stopping up of the blood vessels in a
limited area, have been cured through the indications given by the
particular forms and degrees of aphasia shown by the patients. The
skull is opened at the place indicated by the defect of speech, the
lesion found where the diagnosis suggested, and the cause removed.
This account of Localization will suggest to the reader the truth that
there is no science of Phrenology. No progress has been made in
localizing the intelligence; and the view is now very general that the
whole brain, with all its interchange of impulses from part to part,
is involved in thinking. As for locating particular emotions and
qualities of temperament, it is quite absurd. Furthermore, the
irregularities of the skull do not indicate local brain differences.
It is thought that the relative weight of the brain may be an
indication of intellectual endowment, especially when the brain weight
is compared with the weight of the rest of the body, and that culture
in particular lines increases the surface of the cortex by deepening
and multiplying the convolutions. But these statements can not be
applied off-hand to individuals, as the practise of phrenology would
require.
_Defects of Memory--Amnesia._--The cases given just above, where the
failure of speech was seen to be due to the loss of certain memories
of words, illustrate also a series of mental defects, which are
classed together as Amnesias. Any failure in memory, except the normal
lapses which we call forgetfulness, is included under this term. Just
as the loss of word memories occasions inability to speak, so that of
other sorts of memories occasions other functional disturbances. A
patient may forget objects, and so not know how to use his penknife or
to put on his shoes. He may forget events, and so give false witness
as to the past.
One may forget himself also, and so have, in some degree, a different
character, as is seen, in an exaggerated way, in persons who have
so-called Dual Personality. These patients suddenly fall into a
secondary state, in which they forget all the events of their ordinary
lives, but remember all the events of the earlier periods of the
secondary personality. This state may be described as "general"
amnesia, in contrast to the "partial" amnesia of the other cases
given, in which only particular classes of memories
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