192 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
♦ 
was employing a modifier in an intelligent manner simply because 
in grammatical form it resembled such. It should be noted, how¬ 
ever, that the use of a modifying term even mechanically does 
tend to draw attention upon certain characteristic qualities of 
the object in question; so that mere formal imitation often ends 
by hastening the intelligent use of terms, a point to be worked 
out in detail later. 
The principle is that at the outset the child views the kitten, 
to keep to our illustration, in a certain very concrete, totalized 
way, without differentiating the notions of niceness, of gentle¬ 
ness, of playfulness, and so on. But as experiences with the 
kitten and other domestic animals (including human beings pos¬ 
sibly) increase, these ideas gradually gain a certain degree of in¬ 
dependence or individuality. The attribute denoted by nice for 
instance, is, of course, always experienced in connection with 
some definite thing; but as the number and variety of such things 
are augmented, the characteristic of affording pleasure of a 
special sort, to which is attached the conventional symbol, nice, 
being common to all, it acquires a kind of existence apart from 
the particular things which occasioned it. When this stage is 
reached the child can use the modifier in an intelligent manner. 
He can say, “I have a nice doggie,’’ and the adjective indicates 
that a particular characteristic of his dog has come to clear con¬ 
sciousness in his reactions. He appreciates the quality as such, 
too, for he can employ the term appropriately in reference to 
other objects where he could not have mechanically imitated its 
use. Nice then has become a true particularizing term; and the 
principle is universal in its application to the natural history of 
all modifiers. Of course, a term like the one in question is in¬ 
cessantly changing in its content and in the range of its applica¬ 
tion. As development proceeds extensions are made here, and 
excisions there. Experience is all the time at work remodelling 
it; and just what is accomplished depends upon the peculiar 
character of the experiences. Here is a home where the children 
hear the term applied frequently under a variety of circum¬ 
stances; both physical and spiritual characteristics are desig¬ 
nated by it. But here again is a home where the term is used 
infrequently; the members of the family rarely take the atti- 
