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SCIENCE 



[Vol. XVI. No. 412 



portance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his re- 

 ligion, his paternal disgrace ; and he has not observed himself 

 through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, 

 and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an 

 idol nor the world into a temple ; and we can study him apart 

 from the complex accretions which are the later deposits of 

 his self-consciousness. 



Perhaps one of the best illustrations we can find of the 

 value of this consideration in the study of the child-mind is 

 seen in the reversion to the child-type occasioned by hypno- 

 tism. The signal service of hypnotism, I think, is the demon- 

 stration of the intrinsic motor force of an idea. Any idea 

 tends at once, and irresistibly, to realize itself in action. All 

 conventionalities, proprieties, alternatives, hesitations, are 

 swept away, and the developed mind reveals its skeleton 

 structure, so to speak, its composition from re-active elements. 

 But hypnotism need not have been waited for to show this. 

 The patient observation of the movements of a child during 

 his first year would have put it among the safest generaliza- 

 tions of the science of mind. In the absence of alternative 

 considei-ations, reflections, the child acts, and act it must, on 

 the first suggestion which has the faintest meaning in terms 

 of its feelings of movement. 



2. The study of children is generally the only means of 

 testing the truth of our mental analyses. If we decide that 

 a certain complex product is due to a union of certain sim- 

 pler mental elements, then we may appeal to the proper pe- 

 riod of child-life to see it taking place. The range of growth 

 is so enormous from the infant to the adult, and the begin, 

 nings of the child's mental life are so low in the scale in the 

 matter of instinctive and mental endowment, that there is 

 hardly a question of analysis now under debate which may 

 not be tested by this method. On the other hand, such con- 

 fix-mation shuts out most conclusively the advocates of irre- 

 ducibility in cases where the adult consciousness is silent or 

 utters a favorable voice. A good example of such analysis 

 is seen in the distinction between simple consciousness 

 and self-consciousness. Over and over again have systems 

 been built upon the necessary subject-object theory of con- 

 sciousness; namely, that all subjectivity, or consciousness, 

 necessarily implicates an antithesis between ego and non- 

 ego. But an example of what is thus denied may be seen 

 upon the floor of any nursery where there is a child less 

 than a year of age. 



At this point it is that child psychology is more valu- 

 able than the study of forms of the consciousness of animals. 

 The latter never become men, while children do. In study- 

 ing animals we are always haunted by the fear that the 

 analogy may not hold; that some element essential to the 

 development of the human mind may be entirely wanting. 

 Even in such a question as the localization of the motor 

 functions of the brain, where the analogy is one of compara- 

 tive anatomy and only secondarily of psychology, the mon- 

 key presents analogies with man where dogs do not. But in 

 the study of children we may be always sure that a normal 

 child has in him the promise of a normal man. 



The contrast between this branch of psychology and men- 

 tal pathology also shows points of advantage on the side of 

 the former. In the study of mental disease the mental func- 

 tion as a whole is or may be involved. We are never sure 

 that functional connections and sympathies have not been 



developed in the growth of the personality as a whole, which 

 lead to idiosyncrasies in that area of mental activity which 

 seems to be most unaffected. For this reason the application 

 of the logical "'method of difference," which consists in ob- 

 serving the change brought about in a phenomenon from 

 the removal of part of its antecedent conditions, cannot be 

 always relied upon. 



The same difficulty confronts the student of animal 

 pathology. The indefinite source of error called " shock " is 

 always present. The organs left intact by the disease or the 

 operator sympathize in the sufferings of the organism as a 

 whole; and sometimes temporary loss of function is reported, 

 when time repairs the apparent damage. 



In dealing with the child, however, the same advantage 

 of simplicity is secured without the corresponding disadvan- 

 tage of possible interference of functions. In other words, 

 the simplicity of the child is normal simplicity, while the 

 simplicity of disease or surgery is abnormal simplicity; and 

 the danger of what physicians call " complication " is in the 

 former case entirely ruled out. 



3. Again, in the study of the child-mind, we have the 

 added advantage of a corresponding simplicity on the or- 

 ganic side; that is, we are able to take account of the physi- 

 ological processes at a time when they are relatively simple. 

 I say "relatively simple," for in reality they are enormously 

 complex at birth, and the embryologist pushes his research 

 much further back in the life-history of the organism. But 

 yet they are simple relatively to their complex condition af- 

 ter the formation of habits, motor complexes, brain integra- 

 tions and associations; in short, after the nervous system has 

 been educated to its whole duty in its living environment. 

 For example: a psychology which holds that we have a 

 "speech faculty," an original mental endowment which is 

 incapable of further reduction, may appeal to the latest 

 physiological research and find organic confirmation, at least 

 as far as a determination of its cerebral apparatus is con- 

 cerned ; but such support for the position is wanting when 

 we return to the brain of the infant. Not only do we fail 

 to find the series of centres into which the organic basis of 

 speech has been divided, but even those of them which we 

 do find have not taken up the function, either alone or to- 

 gether, which they perform when speech is actually realized. 

 In other words, the primary object of each of the various 

 centres involved is not speech, but some other and simpler 

 function; and speech arises from a union of such separate 

 functions. 



We accordingly find a development of consciousness keep- 

 ing pace with the development of the physical organism. 

 The extent of possible analogies between the growth of body 

 and that of mind may thus be estimated from below; and 

 any outstanding facts of the inner life which cannot he re- 

 duced to the form of physical analogy (if there be any such 

 facts) get greater prominence and safer estimation. 



The advocates of a spiritual theory of mind, therefore, 

 should be quite ready to adopt this method, even from the 

 standpoint of their traditional caution. Certainly they gain 

 nothing by refusing to subject their high beliefs to the tests 

 of conformity to the requirements of this law of the develop-' 

 ing manifestation of the mental principle. The sphere of 

 critical discussion will then be limited to places in the devel- 

 opment of consciousness where spiritual implications force 



