348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 



v. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND THEOLOGICAL IDEAS. 



Br JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D., 



GBOTE PBOFESSOE OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC AT THE UNIVERSITT COLLEGE, 



LONDON. 



WE may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child- 

 thought about that standing mystery, the self. There is 

 reason to suppose that a good deal of terribly earnest thinking 

 goes on in the childish head respecting the problem of " my " na- 

 ture, " my " existence, " my " origin. 



The date of the first thought about self, the first dim self -aware- 

 ness, probably varies considerably in the case of different children 

 according to rai3idity of mental development and circumstances. 

 The little girl who was afterward to be known as George Sand 

 may be supposed to have had an exceptional development, and the 

 accident to which she refers as having aroused the earliest form 

 of self-consciousness was, of course, exceptional too. There are 

 probably many robust and dull children, knowing little of life's 

 misery, and allowed in general to have their own way, who have 

 little more of self-consciousness than that, say, of a young, well- 

 favored, well-supplied porker. 



The earliest idea of self seems to be obtained by the child 

 through an examination with the senses of touch and sight of his 

 own body. A child has been observed to study his fingers atten- 

 tively in the fourth and fifth months, and this scrutiny goes on all 

 through the second year and even into the third. * Children seem 

 quite early to be impressed by the fact that in laying hold of a 

 part of their body with a hand they get a different kind of ex- 

 perience from that which they obtain when they grasp a foreign 

 object. Through these self-graspings, self-strikings, self-bitings, 

 aided by the very varied and often extremely disagreeable opera- 

 tions of the nurse and others on the surface of their bodies, they 

 probably reach during the first year a dim idea that their body is 

 different from all other things, is " me " in the sense that it is the 

 living seat of pain and pleasure. The growing power of move- 

 ment of limb, especially when the crawling stage is reached, gives 

 a special significance to the body as that which can be moved, and 

 by the movements of which interesting and highly impressive 

 changes in the environment e. g., bangs and other noises can be 

 produced. 



* For the facts see Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes, cap. xxii. Tracy, The Psychology of 

 Childhood, p. 47. 



