SECTION 2. -THE INFANT AND CHILD MIND. 23 



small ones and then large ones, are, to begin with, recognised 

 and then freely distinguished. A pencil, a glove, a hat, a chair, 

 a table; a little later a door, a wardrobe; and later still, a 

 house, a street, are separated with astonishing ease by the 

 eye. 1 Yet the word table, for instance, is not interpreted by 

 the child to mean: "This something, seen at this moment from 

 this angle." Rather will the child identify as a table any table 

 at any time, or even anything resembling a table. Thus san- 

 dals, slippers, shoes, and boots are shoes; all round objects 

 are balls ; every glass vessel is a glass. Given one object seen 

 and named, the child readily regards it as representing a class. 

 The reason for this tendency to generalise is probably as 

 follows. The child's glance is only arrested by the leading 

 features of the object, and he observes it therefore most in- 

 completely. Hence size, colour, variations in shape, position, 

 and the like, are very imperfectly apprehended, and the general 

 and particular are thus readily confounded. When, therefore, 

 an object appears a second time, or a similar object presents 

 itself, vague memory followed on loose observation will identify 

 what is more or less heterogeneous. Secondly, even so far as 

 differences are appreciated, they are nevertheless neglected 

 because not deemed of importance, or, to express this more 

 objectively, because only the known and that which interests 

 fall within the focus. For the child Generalisation signifies 

 psychologically that a certain object or what is for him the 

 same, a certain class of objects having been once singled out 

 will, because of the neural mechanism or the laws of asso- 

 ciation, be automatically isolated when it reappears. 



The infant is practically incapable of associating one object 

 of one class with another of a different class. His griefs and 

 his joys are unaffected by any recollections or reflections, since 

 these are lacking, and reasoning, which implies cross-classi- 

 I fication of memories or associated recollection, is therefore 

 absent. A time, however, arrives when after the invaluable 

 repetitive stage of earlier childhood has passed where every 

 action tends to be repeated a number of times the association 

 of memories and ideas becomes possible, especially with the 

 aid of language. When this happens, random, though not 

 frequent, generalisations as to relations and classes of facts 

 follow in the wake of the similarly random, but frequent, gene- 

 ralisations as to separate facts. Until much later, when his 

 store of knowledge has assumed considerable proportions, the 

 child's interest is predominantly concerned with facts rather 

 than with classes of these. 



1 The sense of touch, as a channel of external information, apparently 

 develops relatively late in the infant life of the individual. Besides, this 

 sense supplies only an infinitesimal portion of our knowledge of the Uni- 

 verse, and its high philosophical status is not easily vindicated before the 

 bar of fact. 



