206 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts } and Letters. 
by “I” or “my” or “me;” when the mother addressed me di¬ 
rectly she w'ould designate me by “yon” or “your’s;” when 
she spoke to the babe about me she wonld use “he” or “him” 
or “his.” Here are eight symbols for the same object, looked at 
from the child’s standpoint, and it would be a long story to tell 
how he could orient himself with reference to each and all of 
these terms for the same individual. To present the matter in 
a sentence here,—the individual must reach a stage of develop¬ 
ment where he can organize a variety of experiences around a 
common center before he can comprehend or use intelligently our 
system of personal pronouns. As you watch him pushing for¬ 
ward in integrating ability, you see him adopting first one form 
and then other forms of the pronouns. At the outset he makes 
his one form do duty in all cases. “Him is a nice boy;” “Me 
wants to go to him’s (or perhaps he’s) house,” are illustrations. 
We shall go into this in greater detail in the chapter on Inflec¬ 
tion; but it may be noticed here that the young child cannot 
readily accommodate himself to the notion of having different 
forms of his words apply to the same unchanging thing, un¬ 
changing so far as he can see. This leads parents, more or less 
intuitively, to avoid the pronouns in speaking to young chil¬ 
dren, and this has the effect to retard the appearance in the 
vocabulary of pronominal forms. 
Then the pronoun, as employed in conversing with a child, 
lacks individually, warmth, color. Try talking to your year- 
old child in pronominative terms, and see how much weaker is 
your speech in personal suggestiveness. On the other hand, to 
continue the nominative stage too long is equally objectionable; 
it seems silly, babyish, ineffective. The opening mind needs to 
be assissted in its grasp of things by all possible concrete aids; 
but once it has got a hold it knocks out the ladder by which it 
lias ascended. This, I take it, is a principle of universal validity 
in mental development, and is one of the forces incessantly at 
work transforming the individual’s interests and abilities. 
This will be the best place, perhaps, in which to glance at the 
forms of the pronouns which are used most frequently at first. 
I said above that one form of the personal pronoun is often 
made to do duty for all cases; but w r hat is this form? Mrs. 
