260 EVOLUTION AND PSYCHOLOGY 



must, that even attention may be unconscious 

 would shock even an alienist so speculative as 

 Ziehen, who persistently identifies the psychic 

 with the conscious. 



PSYCHIC " EECAPITULATION " 



/ 



( Hardly less than animal instinct, child psy- 

 chology, as Darwin in his famous observations 

 on infancy, although not the first was perhaps the 

 third to see, can only be explained on an evolu- 

 tionary basis.) The child, uncivilized and to some 

 extent even savage, is precociously thrust into 

 an environment saturated with adult influences 

 because of language and accumulated grown-up 

 customs, traditions, and ideas; and for this rea- 

 son as well as because of its intense, imitative pro- 

 pensities tends to be very early stripped of many 

 of its psychic rudiments and recapitulatory 

 traces. Yet the more we know the child, the 

 more clearly do we see the germs of many ata- 

 vistic tendencies nipped in the bud, though many 

 of them have so long been. There can no longer 

 be any doubt that the human infant not only 

 tends to but occasionally does develop real words 

 that are its own original creation, products of the 

 rudiment of the same instinct in which language 

 took its first rise. This vestige is thus not com- 

 pletely eliminated by the early, mimetic adoption 

 of the speech of the environment. I have col- 

 lected from the literature over two score of these 



