Human Infancy and the Recapitulation Theory 83 



excitants. These may be illustrated by the fear of snakes and 

 other animals, of celestial objects, of fire, darkness, eyes, teeth, 

 solitude, death, disease, ghosts, etc. A very large number of 

 similar attitudes have been cited as evidence of the recurrence 

 in childhood of ancient attitudes which have been inherited. 

 In all these cases there is evident a confusion of the inherited 

 and the acquired. We are indebted to McDougall's " Introduc- 

 tion to Social Psychology" (1908) for a lucid explanation of 

 this matter. Each of the basic instinct-emotions has its charac- 

 teristic "native excitants/' with the inherent power of rendering 

 it vital, or setting it up in psycho-physical behavior. Sensory 

 abruptness, especially of sound, has this effect with fear; inter- 

 ruption of normal functions is a similar excitant for anger; as is 

 the infant wail for parental solicitude. The various native 

 excitants have not as yet been satisfactorily described but the 

 general principle seems clear enough. It follows that certain 

 "objects" or acquired units of perception built around these 

 excitants, will often have an emotion-exciting value because they 

 so vividly contain the native excitants; such objects are thunder 

 for fear or substances of vile odor for disgust. Other objects 

 will have these emotion-exciting effects by association with 

 the original ones, and it is apparent from the observed variety 

 of these derived or acquired excitants that there is scarcely any 

 limit to their multiplication. Almost every aspect of the natural 

 world has been such a fear excitant, if we may believe the ethnol- 

 ogists, and there is probably no conceivable object which may 

 not have this function under appropriate suggestion. Only 

 native excitants, then, can have ancestral reference, and we may 

 safely neglect all objects connected with emotional attitudes and 

 confine our attention to the possible recapitulatory value of 

 excitants as such. 



Undoubtedly native excitants are very old, but as common 

 experience testifies, they are not peculiar to infancy, and they 

 cannot therefore be regarded as recapitulatory in this sense. 

 It is not impossible that such native excitants may become so 

 embedded in complexes with more dominant emotion-exciting 

 excitants as to lose their original force. Such may be the case 

 with aesthetic or religious objects containing essentially ugly 

 or even essentially disgusting elements, but this does not of it- 

 self assign the native excitant to infancy because it works there 



