350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a double idea of their bodily self, the trunk and limbs which may 

 die and be put in the ground, and the head the seat of the soul 

 which lives on and passes into heaven. But of this more later 

 on. Nay, more. A child may indulge the fancy playfully, at 

 least that the several parts of the body are so many different 

 bodily selves. Laura Bridgman would amuse herself by spelling 

 a word wrong with one hand, slap that hand with the other, and 

 then proceed to spell it right, laughing at her game. Here the 

 offending hand was for the moment personified and given a sort 

 of independent existence. 



Very interesting in connection with the formation of the idea 

 of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to ex- 

 pect a child when first placed before a mirror to recognize his 

 own face. He will smile at the reflection as early as the tenth 

 week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at 

 the sight of a bright object. If held in the nurse's or father's 

 arms to a glass when about six months old, a baby will at once 

 show that he recognizes the image of the familiar face of the lat- 

 ter by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recog- 

 nize his own. He appears at first and for some months to take it 

 for a real object, sometimes smiling as to a stranger or even kiss- 

 ing it, and then trying to grasp it with the hand, turning up the 

 glass or putting his hand behind it in order to see what is really 

 there. Darwin has shown that monkeys behave very much in the 

 same way before a mirror. Little by little he gets used to it, and 

 then, by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the 

 image, as when he notices the reflection of his x)inafore or of the 

 movement of his hands as he points partly, no doubt, by a kind 

 of inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the 

 mirror he reaches the idea that the reflection belongs to himself. 

 By the sixtieth week Preyer's boy had associated the name of his 

 mother with her image, pointing to it when asked where she was. 

 By the twenty-first month he did the same thing in the case of 

 his own image.* 



An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object 

 and try to touch it. Some children, on first noticing their own 

 and other people's shadows, are afraid as at something uncanny. 

 Here, too, in time the strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of 

 course and referred to the sun. 



We know that the phenomena of reflections and shadows, 

 along with those of dreams, had much to do with the develop- 

 ment, in the primitive thought of the race, of the animistic con- 

 ception that everything has a double nature and existence. Do 



* See the very full account of the mirror experiment in Preyer's book (3te Auflage), p. 

 459 e< seq. 



