210 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



understanding the different sounds made to them by the hen, 

 being terror-stricken at the voice of a hawk, newly-born 

 mammals knowing the voice of their mother, &c.* More- 

 over, we find that the child, even for a considerable time after 

 it has begun to use words, manifests a strong tendency to 

 regard all objects, whether animate or inanimate, as ejects. 

 This fact is a matter of such general observation that I need 

 not wait to give special instances. I will, therefore, merely 

 observe that the tendency is not wholly obliterated even 

 when the faculty of speech has been fully acquired, and with 

 it a general knowledge of the distinction between objects as 

 animate and inanimate. Mr. Sully, for instance, gives a case of 

 this when he records the saying of a little girl of five — " Ma, 

 I do think this hoop must be alive ; it is so sensible ; it goes 

 wherever I want it to."t Again, we meet with the same 

 tendency in the psychology of uncultured man. Pages might 

 be filled with illustrations showing that savages all over the 

 world both mentally and expressly personify, or endow with 

 psychical attributes, the inanimate objects and forces of nature; 

 while language, even in its most highly developed forms, still 

 retains the impress of an originally ejective terminology. 

 And, if Professor Max M tiller is right in his generaliza- 

 tion that the personal pronoun " I " is in all languages 

 traceable to roots equivalent to " This one " (indicative of an 

 accompanying gesture-sign), we have additional and more 

 particular evidence of the originally ejective character of the 

 idea of self Nor is it too much to say that even civilized 

 man is still under the sway of this innate propensity to 

 attribute to external things the faculties of feeling and willing 

 of which he is conscious in himself. On the one side we have 

 proof of this in the universal prevalence of the hypothesis of 

 psychism in Nature, while on the other side we meet with 

 further proof in the fact of psychological analysis revealing 

 that our idea of cause is derived from our idea of muscular effort. 



* See Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 161-165. Perez records analogous 

 facts with regard to the infant as unmistakably displayed in the fourteenth week 

 {first Three Years of Childhood, English trans., p. 29), 



t Outlines of Psychology^ p. 378. 



