TRUTH 



lished his Mind of the Child [English translation; Dr. J. 

 Sully has several works on the same subject]. From the 

 careful manuals which these and other observers have 

 published, it is clear that the new-born infant not only 

 has no reason or consciousness, but is also deaf, and only 

 gradually develops its sense and thought-centres. It is 

 only by gradual contact with the outer world that these 

 functions successively appear, such as speech, laughing, 

 etc.; later still come the power of association, the form- 

 ing of concepts and words, etc. Recent anatomic ob- 

 servations quite accord with these physiological facts. 

 Taken together, they convince us that the phronema is 

 undeveloped in the new-born infant; and so we can no 

 more speak in this case of a "seat of the soul" than of 

 a "human spirit" as a centre of thought, knowledge, and 

 consciousness. Hence the destruction of abnormal new- 

 born infants — as the Spartans practised it, for instance, 

 in selecting the bravest — cannot rationally be classed as 

 "murder," as is done in even modern legal works. We 

 ought rather to look upon it as a practice of advantage 

 both to the infants destroyed and to the community. 

 As the whole course of embryology is, according to our 

 biogenetic law, an abbreviated repetition of the history 

 of the race, we must say the same of psychogenesis, or 

 the development of the "soul" and its organ — the 

 phronema. 



Comparative psychology comes next in importance to 

 embryology as a means of studying the ancestral history 

 of the soul. Within the ranks of the vertebrates we 

 find to-day a long series of evolutionary stages which 

 reach up from the lowest acrania and cyclostoma to 

 the fishes and dipneusta, from these to the amphibia, 

 and from these again to the amniota. Among the 

 latter, moreover, the various orders of reptiles and birds 

 on the one hand, and of mammals on the other, show 

 us how the higher psychic powers have been developed 



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