278 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



action ; and these emotions are fully developed and unmistakably 

 exhibited. Here, then, we have the emotional part of our nature 

 apparently full-grown, while the intellectual is yet in its early infancy. 

 We know that it is in vain to reason with such a child : we control 

 and manage him. These feelings are all expansions of the self-feeling 

 which is plainly seen to be the feeling of the entire bodily organiza- 

 tion. The child at first derives pleasure or pain from that which 

 affects its bodily sensations, from the light or the color which pleases 

 its sense of sight, from the song which gratifies its ear, from the 

 warmth which is grateful to its skin, from the food which satisfies its 

 stomach ; and it extends its likings to those persons or things which 

 minister to its comfort, its dislike to such as cause it discomfort, and 

 so it displays its love, its hate and fear. These feelings are all reflected 

 upon and through the medium of the body in facial and other move- 

 ments. As the nerve-centres in which this self-feeling resides are 

 roused and excited, so, according to the centre stimulated and accord- 

 ing to the degree of stimulation, we have a corresponding series of 

 movements as the result. There is a direct outcome of action, a direct 

 conversion of force into motion, so to speak ; without this we should 

 not know that such stimulation had taken place. 



How motion immediately follows the application of a stimulus to 

 the centres is especially shown at this time of life. There is no 

 deliberation, no delay ; the action, the demonstration of joy, or sorrow, 

 or resentment, or approval, is instantaneous. The motor centres re- 

 spond to the stimulus as immediately as the pupil responds to the light, 

 and the reflex action of the one is as purely physicial as that of the 

 other. A child at this age possesses ideas formed from the memories 

 of sensations and their associations, but its ideas are few, and it does 

 not link them into chains of reasoning. Its intellectual processes are 

 scanty, and so it comes to pass that the excitants of its nerve-centres 

 are for the most part external events and sights', which at once result 

 in bodily or facial demonstration rather than in internal mental action. 



If mankind had stopped at the level of a child, if the higher and 

 more complex emotions did not exist, it is not likely that various seats 

 of emotion would have been mapped out in the brain. Emotion in 

 children and animals is manifestly so much more a bodily excitation, 

 the bodily movement follows so immediately as the result, that we do 

 not confine it to a mental phenomenon as we do the higher emotions 

 of man. But physiologically there seems to be no line of demarcation 

 between simple feelings and the highest emotions. Befoi*e we examine 

 the adult as we see him in the educated and refined inhabitant of the 

 cities of Europe, we may pause and consider the various intermediate 

 stages which carry on the succession from the child upward. There 

 is the savage of all grades of savagery, from the Earthman to the 

 stoical brave of North America who scorns to exhibit emotion of any 

 kind. Manv travellers have told us how like the tribes of Africa are 



