760 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



will has directly very little influence. It can affect it only by dis- 

 posing at its desire, when it can, the circumstances that call the 

 instinct into exercise. 



Till the end of four months, I believe, the child makes no mo- 

 tions that are not automatic, reflexive, or instinctive. From the 

 fifth month, perhaps, certainly in the sixth and seventh months, 

 imitative motions appear, the nature of which is obscure, but 

 which are of signal importance in the point of view of psycho- 

 genesis and education. It is hardly necessary to say that I am 

 speaking of unconscious motions instinctively imitated, not of 

 conscious and voluntary imitation, which will come much later. 



Preyer seems to me to be under a mistake when he supposes 

 imitatio'h to be essentially voluntary. To my mind there is no 

 will without an expressed intention. Where is the intention, the 

 reflecting consciousness, when an infant, hearing another one cry- 

 ing, begins to cry by contagion, or when a child of seven months, 

 seeing me tapping the table or the window with my fingers, exe- 

 cutes a poorly imitative scratching with his fingers ? Nurses 

 teach children at this age to say good-by with a motion of the 

 hand, which their wards imitate at sight. I was recently told of a 

 boy twelve months old on a railway train, who, when his father, 

 to quiet him, snapped his fingers in his face, immediately imitated 

 the motion, to the surprise of all. Rubbing my hands one day at 

 the table, partly because of the cold, partly in idleness, I saw a 

 little girl three years old stop eating to rub her hands too. The 

 same child, when twenty months old, seeing an image of a crying 

 child, by an unconscious imitation opened her own mouth. Chil- 

 dren laugh when they see people laughing, yawn, sing, cough, 

 spit, snuff the candle, light a paper at the fire, and pretend to 

 read and write, long before they comprehend any of those acts. 

 One of their greatest pleasures is to imitate the cries of animals, 

 either spontaneously or after another. Their plays are nearly all 

 imitations of adult life. When they hear a story that engages 

 them, we can see them taking on, one after another, the expres- 

 sions of the characters ; and when they begin to speak, they 

 repeat all they hear, including oaths and other bad words, which 

 it horrifies us to hear from them. It is hardly correct to see in 

 this aptitude of children to imitate a sign of inferiority, as De- 

 launay did. It is rather a promise of intelligence. What is called 

 the child's docility results largely from these endowments. It 

 learns everything, at first, by imitation to speak, write, and 

 sing. Unconscious imitation accounts for many facts for the 

 fact, among others, that in a family of several children the 

 younger ones are often more advanced than their elders were at 

 the same age. But this more than half animal plasticity is not 

 really intelligence, although it announces it ; and it is truly un- 



