32 
TKANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
is not to discover how it comes then and thus to appear. But that ques- 
tion is not important here, where the concern is not with the mode of 
the rise of effort, but rather with its effects after it has arisen. And the 
point is that the child is fundamentally transformed by the acquisition 
of this new power. On the one hand, he becomes self-conscious, and on 
the other he begins to exhibit purpose with all that that implies. 
At first volitional effort is called forth hut seldom; hut soon, as the 
efficacy of effort to realize the ideas there is desire to realize is more 
fully experienced, the habit arises of trying for satisfactions there is dif- 
ficulty in obtaining. The child no longer understands your words, or 
fails to do so, with equal passivity; he now can and does search for your 
meaning, question you, work it out, think it out. No longer does he 
perform actions only when his powers are fully ripe, and when he is 
strongly incited thereto; hut he endeavors and tries, persistently and 
strenuously, to hold his muscles to the precise performances his ideas 
depict, much as later the schoolboy learns to write bv putting forth the 
power of his whole body, with tension in the feet, squirming of the 
trunk, and wonderful facial grimaces. In a word, purposeful action is 
born, ideas have become ends, aims, goals, that inspire and draw out 
actions. At this time it is that speech appears, at this time it is that 
lies are first told, and that rude mechanical devices are first invented; 
the child has become humanized. 
But this is not all. Experiencing agency and the efficacy of effort 
in himself, and finding it natural that what is striven after with all 
endeavor should he accomplished, purposeful agency becomes the child’s 
greatest resource for explaining. Did the movements • and actions 
of the bodies of others before puzzle him? Well, they can now 
he explained on the ground of efficient causation. The movements 
of his own body have their casual origin in purpose, and effective 
puipose is the source from which spring those most difficult puzzles, 
the actions of others. And he applies the explanation to Nature 
also. Totally ignorant of the laws that science uses for explain- 
ing the movements of things, many of these movements appear to 
him quite as mysterious as the movements of his fellows, and here again 
he resorts to purposeful agency. When a chair falls on and hurts 
him, he punishes the “intentional” injury with a kick; when her doll 
does not sit up, the little girl spanks it; when it thunders and lightens, 
the child thinks that God is angry; when he comes to know vaguely 
of the inner parts of the body, he asks if there is not some man in 
there working them; and so it is with all the mysteries about him. Like 
his anemistic savage ancestors, the child anthropomorphises all natural 
phenomena. 
