The realization of this extraordinary adaptive- ness of the very young child should save parents many an anxious day and sleepless night. There is practically nothing more easy than to impress upon the child whatever habits of daily — and nightly! — routine one wishes to give him, if he be taken early enough. The only requirements are knowledge of what is good for him, and then inviolable regularity in everything that concerns him. Under this treatment he will become as "obstinate" in being "good" as the opposite so-called indulgent or capricious treatment always make him in being "bad." There is no reason whatever that he should be walked with or held, that he should be taken up when he cries, that he should be trotted when he awakes, or that he should have a light by night. Things like this are simply bad habits for which the parents have themselves to thank. The child adapts himself to his treatment, and it is his treatment that his habits reflect.
During the second half-year — sooner or later in particular cases — the child is ready to begin to imitate. Imitation is henceforth, for the follow- THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 79 ing few years, the most characteristic thing about his action. He first imitates movements, later sounds, especially vocal sounds. His imitations themselves also show progress, being at first what is called " simple imitation " (repeating a distinc- tion already spoken of in the chapter on ani- mals), as when the child lies in bed in the morn- ing and repeats the same sound over and over again. He hears his own voice and imitates it. In this sort of imitation he simply allows his in- stinct to reproduce what he hears without con- trol or interference from him. He does not im- prove, but goes on making the same sounds with the same mistakes again and again. But a little later he begins what is called " persistent imita- tion " — the " try-try-again," already spoken of — which is a very different thing. Persistent imi- tation shows unmistakably the presence of will. The child is not satisfied with simple imitation or mere repetition, whether it be good or bad in its results. He now sees his errors and aims con- sciously to improve. Note the child's struggles to speak a word right by imitation of the pronun- ciation of others. And he succeeds. He gradu- ally gets his muscles under control by persistence in his try-try-again.
Then he goes further — about the beginning of his second year, usually. He gets the idea that imitation is the way to learn, and turns all his effort into imitations experimentally carried out. He is now ready to learn most of the great pro- cesses of his later culture. Speech, writing, this special accomplishment and that, are all learned by experimental imitation.
The example of the child's trying to draw or write has already been cited. He looks at the 7 8o THE STORY OF THE MIND.
copy before him; sets all his muscles of hand and arm into massive contraction; turns and twists his tongue, bends his body, winds his legs together, holds his breath, and in every way concentrates his energies upon the copying of the model. In all this he is experimenting.
He produces a wealth of movements, from which, very gradually, as he tries and tries again, the proper ones are selected out. These he practises, and lets the superfluous ones fall away, until he secures the requisite control over hand and arm. Or suppose a child endeavouring, in the crudest fashion, to put a rubber on the end of a pencil, after seeing some one else do it — just the sort of thing a year-old child loves to imitate. What a chaos of ineffective movements! But with repeated effort he gets nearer and nearer to it, and finally succeeds.
On the side of action, two general principles have been formulated in child psychology, both illustrated in the cases and experiments now given: The one, Motor Suggestion, is, as we saw, a principle of general psychology. Its impor- tance to the child is that by it he forms Habits, useful responses to his environment, and so saves himself many sad blunders. The other principle is that of Imitation; by it the child learns new things directly in the teeth of his habits. By exer- cising in an excessive way what he has already learned through his experimental imitations, he is continually modifying his habits and making new adaptations. These two principles dominate the active life of the adult man as well.
Personality Suggestion. — A further set of facts may be cited to illustrate the working of Sug- gestion, now in the sphere of the receptive life.
THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 8l They are important as showing the child's progress in learning the great features of personality.
One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its responses to its environ- ment is the tendency to recognise differences of personality. It responds to what have been called Suggestions of Personality. As early as the sec- ond month it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic meth- ods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of pro- testation or acquiescence, to these personal varia- tions. Its associations of personality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happi- ness or misery depends upon the presence of cer- tain kinds of " personality suggestion." It is quite a different thing from the child's behavior toward things which are not persons. Things conie to be, with some few exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite, more and more unimportant; things may be subordinated to regular treatment or reaction. But persons be- come constantly more important, as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its expressions equal the person in all his attributes.
I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in his dealings with per- sons— an uncertainty aroused by the moods, emo- 82 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
tions, changes of. expression, and shades of treat- ment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the "projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal consciousness.
It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little detail.
i. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is movement. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady attention are directed to moving things — a swaying curtain, a moving light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that brings him his bottle, move- ment that regulates the stages of his bath, move- ment that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption from pain, is this — movements come to succour him. Change in his bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earli- est reflection in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this stage his "per- THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 83 sonality suggestion " is a pain-movement-pleasure state of mind; to this he reacts with a smile, and a crow, and a kick. Undoubtedly this association gets some of its value from the other similar one in which the movements are the infant's own. It is by movements that he gets rid of pains and secures pleasures.
Many facts tend to bear out this position. My child cried in the dark when I handled her, although I imitated the nurse's movements as closely as possible. She tolerated a strange pres- ence so long as it remained quietly in its place; but let it move, and especially let it usurp any of the pieces of movement-business of the nurse or mother, and her protests were emphatic. The movements tended to bring the strange elements of a new face into the vital association, pain- movement-pleasure, and so to disturb its familiar course; this constituted it a strange "person- ality."
It is astonishing, also, what new accidental elements may become parts of this association. Part of a movement, a gesture, a peculiar habit of the nurse, may become sufficient to give as- surance of the welcome presence and the pleas- ures which the presence brings. Two notes of my song in the night stood for my presence to H., and no song from any one else could re- place it. A lighted match stopped the crying of E. for food in her fourteenth week, although it was but a signal for a process of food prepara- tion lasting several minutes; and a simple light never stopped her crying under any other circum- stances.
2. With this first start in the sense of person- ality we find also the beginning of the recognition »4 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
of different personalities. It is evident that the sense of another's presence thus felt in the infant's consciousness rests, as all associations rest, upon regularity or repetition; his sense of expectancy is aroused whenever the chain of events is started. This is soon embodied largely in two indications: the face and the voice. But it is easy to see that this is a very meagre sense of personality; a moving machine which brought pain and allevi- ated suffering might serve as well. So the child begins to learn, in addition, the fact that persons are in a measure individual in their treatment of him; that their individuality has elements of un- certainty or irregularity about it. This growing sense is very clear to one who watches an infant in its second half year. Sometimes its mother gives it a biscuit, but sometimes she does not. Sometimes the father smiles and tosses the child; sometimes he does not. Even the indulgence of the grand- mother has its times and seasons. The child looks for signs of these varying moods and meth- ods of treatment; for his pains of disappointment arise directly on the basis of that former sense of regular personal presence upon which his ex- pectancy goes forth.
This new element of the child's sense of per- sons becomes, at one period of its development, quite the controlling element. His action in the presence of the persons of the household becomes hesitating and watchful. Especially does he watch the face, for any expressive indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression is now the most regular as well as the most deli- cate indication. Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 85 sensibility to these differences; and normal chil- dren all do. Animals are also very expert at this.
All through the child's second year, and longer, his sense of the persons around him is in this stage. The incessant "why?" with which he greets any action affecting him, or any in- formation given him, is witness to the simple puzzle of the apparent capriciousness of persons. Of course he can not understand "why"; so the simple fact to him is that mamma will or won't, he knows not beforehand which. He is unable to anticipate the treatment in detail, and he has not of course learned any principles of interpre- tation of the conduct of father or mother lying back of the details.
But in all this period there is germinating in his consciousness — and this very uncertainty is an important element of it— the seed of a far-reaching thought. His sense of persons — moving, pleasure- or-pain-giving, uncertain but self-directing per- sons— is now to become a sense of agency, of power, which is yet not the power of the regular- moving door on its hinges or the rhythmic swing- ing of the pendulum of the clock. The sense of personal agency is now forming, and it again is potent for still further development of the social consciousness. It is just here, I think, that imi- tation becomes so important in the child's life. This is imitation's opportunity. The infant watches to see how others act, because his own weal and woe depends upon this "how"; and in- asmuch as he knows not what to anticipate, his mind is open to every suggestion of movement. So he falls to imitating. His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of adaptation 86 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
which imitation expresses, it acts out these de- tails for himself.
It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes. Sug- gestion begins to lose the regularity of its work- ing, for it meets the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes "con- trary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard, and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality. For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.
3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence and another, so now he learns the difference between one character and another. Every character is more or less regu- lar in its irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud, pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no adult is present who has au- thority or will to punish him. This stage in his " knowledge of man " leads to very marked dif- ferences of conduct on his part.
4. He now goes on to acquire real self -conscious- ness and social feeling. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate heading below.
THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 8?
It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about Personality-Suggestion. It is a gen- eral term for the information which the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called the "projective " sense of personality.* There is, i. A bare distinction of persons from things on the ground of peculiar pain- movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or capriciousness of the behav- iour of these persons, which suggests personal agency. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, be- tween the modes of behaviour or personal characters of different persons. 4. After his sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, he gets what is really self -consciousness and social feeling.
Self -consciousness. — So far as we have now gone the child has only a very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons who move about him. The persons are " projective " to him, mere bodies or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun, as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes about * It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is curious to note that, besides the general gregarious- ness which many animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem to recognise dogs by smell. So with cats, which also respond instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs Horses seem to be guided by sight. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.
88 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of others.
Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others,, he finds himself gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same actions with them, to discover what they are feel- ing, what their motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees his father han- dle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the child's curi- osity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the im- pulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive of the action.
This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the devel- opment of the child; and because of this twofold significance it is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social philosophy.
i. By such imitation the child learns to asso- ciate his own sense of physical power, together with his own private pleasures and pains, with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be characteristic of the persons of his THE MIND' OF THE CHILD. 89 social circle, become his, in his own thought. He is now for himself an agent who has the marks of a Person or a Self. He now understands from the inside all the various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer " pro- jective " — simply there, outside, in the environ- ment; it has become what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles.
This is what we mean by Self-consciousness. It is not an inborn thing with the child. He gradually acquires it. And it is not a sense of a distinct and separate self, first known and then compared with other persons. On the contrary, it is gradually built up in the child's mind from the same material exactly as that of which he makes up his thought of other persons. The deeds he can do he first sees others doing; only then can he imitate them and find out that he also is a being who can perform them.
So it goes all through our lives. Our sense of Self is constantly changing, constantly being en- riched. We have not the same thought of self two days in succession. To-day I think of my- self as something to be proud of, to-morrow as something to be ashamed of. To-day I learn something from you, and the thought that it is common to you and to me is the basis of my sympathy with you. To-morrow 1 learn to com- mit the unworthy act which Mr. A. commits, and the thought that he and I are so far the same is the basis of the common disapproval which I feel of him and me.
2. The second result of this imitative learning about personality is of equal importance. When 90 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
the child has taken up an action by imitation and made it subjective, finding out that personality has an inside, something more than the mere physical body, then he reads this fact back into the other persons also. He says to himself: "He too, my little brother, must have in him a sense of agency similar to this of mine. He acts imi- tatively, too; he has pleasures and pains; he shows sympathy for me, just as I do for him. So do all the persons with whom I have become so far acquainted. They are, then, 'subjects 'as I am — something richer than the mere 'projects' which I had supposed." Soother persons become essentially like himself; and not only like himself, but identical with himself so far as the particular marks are concerned which he has learned from them. For it will be remembered that all these marks were at first actually taken up by imitation from these very persons. The child is now giv- ing back to his parents, teachers, etc., only the material which he himself took from them. He has enriched it, to be sure; with it he now reads into the other persons the great fact of subjective agency; but still whatever he thinks of them has come by way of his thought of himself, and that in turn was made up from them.
This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when they speak of the " ejective " self. It is the self of some one else as I think of it; in other words, it is myself "ejected" out by me and lodged in him.
The Social and Ethical Sense. — From this we see what the Social Sense is. It is the feeling which arises in the child or man of the real iden- THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 91 tity, through its imitative origin, of all possible thoughts of self, whether yourself, myself, or some one else's self. The bond between you and me is not an artificial one; it is as natural as is the recognition of personal individuality. And it is doing violence to this fundamental fact to say, as social science so often assumes, that the indi- vidual naturally separates himself or his interests from the self or the interests of others. He is, on the contrary, bound up with others from the start by the very laws of his growth. His social action and feeling are natural to him. The child can not be selfish only nor generous only; he may seem to be this or that, in this circumstance or that, but he is really social all the time.
Furthermore, his sense of right and wrong, his Ethical Sense, grows up upon this sense of the social bond. This I can not stop to explain fur- ther. But it is only when social relationships are recognised as essential in the child's growth that we can understand the mutual obligations and duties which the moral life imposes upon us all.
How to Observe Children, with Especial Refer- ence to Observations of Imitation. — There are one or two considerations of such practical impor- tance to all those who wish to observe children that I venture to throw them together — only say- ing, by way of introduction, that nothing less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitations. The Self is really the form in which the personal influences surrounding the child take on their new individu- ality.
i. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by a detailed state- ment of the personal influences which have affect- 92 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
ed the child. This is the more important since the child sees few persons, and sees them con- stantly. It is not only likely — it is inevitable — that he make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by imitation, out of the "copy" set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of his child- hood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year- old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal " copy " — to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree their disposi- tions are; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure in a new context, a little world, which re- flects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his sen- sibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits? — they are character!
2. A point akin to the first is this: the obser- vation of each child should describe with great accuracy the child's relations to other children. Has he brothers or sisters? how many of each, and of what age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child has only adult " copy." He can not interpret his father's actions, or his mother's, of- tentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 93 the stimulus, for example, of games in which per- sonification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he becomes preco- cious in some lines of instruction, he fails in va- riety of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children, especially to separate off one or two children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next.
3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, " platonic friendships," " chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts — and there is a very great variety of them — an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well- formed influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teach- ers have been alive to the pros and cons of allow- ing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This dan- ger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that. Con- sider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive na- ture, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social 94 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
tree, is placed in a new environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self — her very personality; it is nothing less than that — utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social in- fluences. Instead of this, she is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in the morning, with one other person, a " copy " set before her, as immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers, teachers, elders, give the chil- dren room! They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imi- tative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social conti- nence. So impressively true is this from the hu- man point of view that, in my opinion — formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion — friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sen- timents into a wider field of social exercise.
THE MIND OF THE CHILD. 95 One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the independ- ence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the best discipline.