756 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and more complex sensations gradually modifying its simple and 

 ingenuous egoism; and sympathy appearing and rising out of 

 self-love, and transforming it as would a ferment. The child's 

 social nature breaks out long before the end of the first year ; it 

 begins by beaming on the nurse and the mother, and then the 

 child smiles at all pleasant and kindly faces. Play, which begins 

 from this time to hold a large place in its life, appears to us in its 

 origin as an essentially social pleasure. At the same time with the 

 affectionate feelings we see arise those of a contrary character, 

 like jealousy, which St. Augustine fixed in the sixth month. 



Feelings and passions of a higher order are attributed by some 

 writers to children of this age the taste for the beautiful, for 

 example. Some would give it to the child at the breast, with 

 reason, if infants' admiration for bright lights and vivid colors 

 is a taste for the beautiful. While this tendency is common to 

 children with many animals, we have a right to see in it a nascent 

 aesthetic feeling. M. Victor Egger has described a case of musi- 

 cal enthusiasm in a child less than six months old. " Lying on a 

 bed, its nurse having already excited it by playing with it, the 

 Marseillaise was sung to it (in a man's voice). It listened, looked 

 up, with throbbing mouth and throat, throwing its arms out from 

 time to time. In the midst of the song it uttered a single sharp 

 cry that almost frightened us. During all this time it exhibited 

 an intense, joyous emotion, but too deep for infantine joy. It 

 might be said that it put itself in unison with what it heard. The 

 song was not repeated. The child's excitement was too great." 

 Whether enthusiasm or not, there was certainly more than a sim- 

 ple sensation in the emotion thus described. It is very certain 

 that a child of that age should be spared such an intoxication, 

 which could not be repeated many times without grave prejudice 

 to the firmness of its nerves and its psychical equilibrium. 



I have not perceived at the period we are considering anything 

 resembling the moral feeling which Mr. Darwin and M. B. Perez 

 believe they have found in the nursling ; it appears later, largely 

 as a fruit of education. Associations of agreeable or disagreeable 

 ideas which the infant is susceptible of from its first months 

 should not be confounded with rational feelings, like those of 

 order and justice and right and duty. 



The movements are next to receive our attention; they are 

 the only possible signs of what is going on in the child. Its af- 

 fective sensations, its representative sensations, its feelings all 

 the phenomena of its psychic life which we have so far studied 

 are apparent to us only through their motive manifestations. But 

 what we have been able to say in passing of such and such move- 

 ments as expressions of consciousness is not enough. The motions 

 deserve a special study in themselves and for themselves, in view 



