LITTLE MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE
[Illustration: _John Fiske_]
Little Masterpieces
of Science
Edited by George Iles
MIND
_By_
John Fiske Oliver W. Holmes
James Sully Henry Maudsley
Francis Galton William B. Carpenter
William H. Hudson Thomas H. Huxley
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1902
Copyright, 1900, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Copyright, 1902, by Doubleday, Page & Co.
Copyright, 1895, by D. Appleton & Co.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Hyphenated and accented words have been
standardized. Obvious printers errors, including punctuation have been
silently corrected. Undevelopment, unseizable, traru, although not
valid words, make sense in the context and I have therefore left them
as in the original. All other inconsistencies have been left as in the
original except where noted at the end of this file.
PREFACE
The study of mind was advanced as remarkably during the nineteenth
century as any of its sister sciences. Here, as elsewhere, observation
grew keener, new instrumental tests were adopted, and interpretation
became more sagacious. A fact as commonplace as the length of human
babyhood, when it came under the eye of John Fiske, went far to explain
the foundations of the family, and how it came about that primitive man,
to whom much was given, so added to his gifts that at last the gulf
betwixt him and his next of kin became all but infinite. Of the new
study of children, which owes a weighty debt to Darwin and Preyer,
Professor Sully is a worthy exponent. In this volume he has something to
say of the deepest interest to parents, to all students of the early
unfolding of human faculty. In the inquiry of Mr. Galton regarding Twins
we have a sterling example of the statistical method. Who shall call
that method dry and unfruitful after he reads what it brought to this
patient and discerning investigator?
If it be assumed that there is nothing in the mind that has not been in
the senses, it becomes a question of importance, How may sight, the
noblest of the senses, come to its best estate? Has it been affected for
good or harm by civilized life? This question is discussed with shrewd
humour by Mr. Hudson in his chapter on the sight of savages. One of the
most promising fields of research directs its quest to the riches
commonly hid beneath the surface of the mental sea. It seems probable
that before the close of the twentieth century means may be discovered
of sounding the depths of unconscious and sub-conscious being, means
comparable with the powers of exploration which the X-ray has bestowed
upon the physicist. To this alluring field of inquiry no better
introduction can be given than Dr. Holmes affords us in this volume. Dr.
Maudsley's chapter on Memory treats a faculty which lies at the base of
all mental wealth, the talent for accumulation, the ability to command
at will every item of the mind's crowded treasure-house. Whether
remembered or forgotten, every impression stamped upon a sound, capable
brain, goes to build up and refine the judgment. This power, under the
name of Common Sense, is treated by Dr. Carpenter with the fulness of
suggestion which always marked that veteran thinker.
The main value of the study of the mind is after all, to direct the
development of mind. No spokesman of science ever urged the reform of
education with so much force as Huxley. Two of his pleas are here
presented; they have lost little of their point with the flight of
years. His argument for laboratory practice has, happily, borne abundant
fruit on both sides of the Atlantic. Manual training, the elementary
form of that practice, is now taught in thousands of our public schools,
and should be freely offered in all. It means putting boys and girls in
full possession of themselves, with a profound impetus to intelligence
when a knowledge of things replaces the repetition of symbols.
The reader may wish to extend his survey of the science of mind beyond
the books laid under contribution in this volume. No better author can
be recommended than Professor William James, of Harvard University. His
"Talks to Teachers on Psychology" is as instructive and delightful to
the ordinary reader as to the audience for which it was specially
written. Professor James's "Principles of Psychology," in two volumes,
and "Briefer Course in Psychology," in one volume, are for systematic
study. All three works are published by Henry Holt & Co., New York.
GEORGE ILES.
CONTENTS
FISKE, JOHN
THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN.
Wallace pointed out that when once the intelligence of man
became dominant, his body would change but little. Wallace
brought up a baby orang-outang which had a period of infantile
helplessness much longer than that of a lamb or a calf. The
still longer infancy of the human babe was most significant
to John Fiske. It showed that the highest nervous development
is the slowest. The prolongation of infancy lengthens the
period of maternal affection, tends to keep parents and
children together, and thus the institution of the family is
founded. Progress has been in the direction of bringing out
the higher spiritual attributes of man: hence the elemental
truth of religion. 3
SULLY, JAMES
THE NEW STUDY OF CHILDREN.
Man has the child always with him. The study of the child
is now scientific. The unfoldings of an infant mind throw
light on the development of the human race. Child-study is
necessary if education is to be rightly directed. Children
often reticent: sometimes ask strange questions. To understand
children, love and knowledge are required. Observation,
experiment and their records. Individual cases should be
compared on a large scale. 21
GALTON, FRANCIS
TWINS, THEIR HISTORY AS A CRITERION OF THE RELATIVE POWERS OF
NATURE AND NURTURE.
Twins alike by nature may as adults be compared to note how
far diversity of circumstance has been influential. Twins
unlike by nature and educated alike show how far nurture
compares with inherited qualities as determining character.
Extraordinary cases of resemblance: twins widely separated
develop the same disease or mania at the same time. Only
illness or accident causes difference between twins alike
in early life. Twins originally unlike so remain, although
educated alike. Nature vastly stronger than nurture in the
making of man. 53
HUDSON, WILLIAM H.
SIGHT IN SAVAGES.
Keen observation of cards by a player whose vision otherwise
was ordinary. We see what we look for. Sight in savages is
trained to detect particular objects,--men, beasts and birds
of prey, reptiles, game and the like. Sight in civilized
man is just as sharp, but is directed to different objects,
the letters of a printed page, for example. 79
HOLMES, OLIVER W.
MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS.
Do we ever think without knowing that we are thinking? Leibnitz
long ago said yes. We remember a name by ceasing the conscious
search for it. One goes to sleep with a problem in mind, and
awakens with the solution clear. The man of genius is inspired
he knows not how: the deepest things are not in the consciousness.
How Burns composed his poems. An idea planted in a thinker's
mind will grow when he is least conscious of growth. 95
MAUDSLEY, HENRY
MEMORY.
Unless the mind retains impressions and can recall them, no
development is possible. Acts at first difficult become easy
because nerves and muscles remember. Attention is the mother
of memory. The more various and intimate the association
of ideas the better. 115
CARPENTER, WILLIAM B.
COMMON SENSE.
Walking and other common movements of the body become all
but automatic. In much the same way mental experiences
become organized into judgments which are largely or wholly
true. Judgment in mathematics or other sciences demands
special training. Grammar is often unconsciously acquired.
The intuitions of the practised detective. The desire to
do right strengthens the intellect. A wise man trusts to
the spontaneities of his mind, just as a rider may trust
his horse to find its way home. The human race, like the
individual man, grows in common sense, abandons absurd
practices and beliefs. 131
HUXLEY, THOMAS H.
A LIBERAL EDUCATION.
If we are to win the game of life we must understand and obey
its rules. No man wholly uneducated. A liberal education
makes the most of body, mind and heart. Education to the
poor is of supreme importance: reading and writing are
merely the means of education. The classics should be taught
in a scientific way. Thorough knowledge of the earth as a
centre from which study may proceed. Literature and history
are indispensable. 151
HUXLEY, THOMAS H.
SCIENCE AND CULTURE.
The themes of classical education are less important than
those of science. For culture an exclusively scientific
education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary
education. New knowledge has so much increased in modern
times as to sway daily life. The scientific method is now
recognized as the one mode of discerning or discovering
truth. What in the past men said about things is vastly
less to the point than what can be learned now at first
hand. The Greeks looked to Nature, let us also look to
Nature and not merely repeat what the Greeks reported.
Modern languages, especially English, as means of culture.
Science cannot be applied unless its principles are understood.
The mastery of these principles is culture. Art and letters,
no less than science, are needed for a well-rounded mind. 171
MIND
THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
JOHN FISKE
[John Fiske attained distinction in three distinct fields of
letters: as a historian, as a scientific interpreter of
religion, as an expositor of the philosophy of evolution. In
this last department of his work his original contribution
was the theory here set forth, taken from a chapter in "A
Century of Science and Other Essays," copyright by Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York, 1900. Mr. Fiske died in
1901, in his sixtieth year.]
When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave us
that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from allied
forms through the operation of natural selection, it must have been like
a mental illumination to every person who comprehended it. But after all
it left a great many questions unexplained, as was natural. It accounted
for the phenomena of organic development in general with wonderful
success, but it must have left a great many minds with the feeling: If
man has been produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural
selection has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway
essentially different from lower races? Is not man really dethroned,
taken down from that exceptional position in which we have been
accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in the course of
the future, for other beings to come upon the earth as far superior to
man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons of Jurassic antiquity?
Such questions used to be asked, and when they were asked, although one
might have a very strong feeling that it was not so, at the same time
one could not exactly say why. One could not then find any scientific
argument for objections to that point of view. But with the further
development of the question the whole subject began gradually to wear a
different appearance; and I am going to give you a little bit of
autobiography, because I think it may be of some interest in this
connection. I am going to mention two or three of the successive stages
which the whole question took in my own mind as one thing came up after
another, and how from time to time it began to dawn upon me that I had
up to that point been looking at the problem from not exactly the right
point of view.
When Darwin's "Descent of Man" was published in 1871, it was of course a
book characterized by all his immense learning, his wonderful fairness
of spirit and fertility of suggestion. Still, one could not but feel
that it did not solve the question of the origin of man. There was one
great contrast between that book and his "Origin of Species." In the
earlier treatise he undertook to point out a _vera causa_ [true cause]
of the origin of species, and he did it. In his "Descent of Man" he
brought together a great many minor generalizations which facilitated
the understanding of man's origin. But he did not come at all near to
solving the central problem, nor did he anywhere show clearly why the
natural selection might not have gone on forever producing one set of
beings after another distinguishable chiefly by physical differences.
But Darwin's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, at an early stage in
his researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnant suggestion. In
that one respect Wallace went further than ever Darwin did. It was a
point of which, indeed, Darwin admitted the importance. It was a point
of which nobody could fail to understand the importance, that in the
course of the evolution of a very highly organized animal, if there came
a point at which it was of more advantage to that animal to have
variations in his intelligence seized upon and improved by natural
selection than to have physical changes seized upon, then natural
selection would begin working almost exclusively upon that creature's
intelligence, and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent,
while his physical organism would change but slightly. Now, that of
course applied to the case of man, who is changed physically but very
slightly from the apes, while he has traversed intellectually such a
stupendous chasm.
As soon as this statement was made by Wallace, it seemed to me to open
up an entirely new world of speculation. There was this enormous
antiquity of man, during the greater part of which he did not know
enough to make history. We see man existing here on the earth, no one
can say how long, but surely many hundreds of thousands of years, yet
only during just the last little fringe of four or five thousand years
has he arrived at the point where he makes history. Before that,
something was going on, a great many things were going on, while his
ancestors were slowly growing up to that point of intelligence where it
began to make itself felt in the recording of events. This agrees with
Wallace's suggestion of a long period of psychical change, accompanied
by slight physical change.
Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin's "Descent of Man" came out,
just about the same time I happened to be reading Wallace's account of
his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, and how at one time he caught
a female orang-outang with a new-born baby, and the mother died, and
Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang by hand; and this baby
orang-outang had a kind of infancy which was a great deal longer than
that of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothing compared to human infancy
in length. This little orang-outang could not get up and march around,
as mammals of less intelligence do, when he was first born, or within
three or four days; but after three or four weeks or so he would get up,
and begin taking hold of something and pushing it around, just as
children push a chair; and he went through a period of staring at his
hands, as human babies do, and altogether was a good deal slower in
getting to the point where he could take care of himself. And while I
was reading of that I thought, Dear me! if there is any one thing in
which the human race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is
in the enormous duration of their infancy; but it is a point that I do
not recollect ever seeing any naturalist so much as allude to.
It happened at just that time that I was making researches in psychology
about the organization of experiences, the way in which conscious
intelligent action can pass down into quasi-automatic action, the
generation of instincts, and various allied questions; and I thought,
Can it be that the increase of intelligence in an animal, if carried
beyond a certain point, must necessarily result in prolongation of the
period of infancy,--must necessarily result in the birth of the mammal
at a less developed stage, leaving something to be done, leaving a good
deal to be done, after birth? And then the argument seemed to come along
very naturally, that for every action of life, every adjustment which a
creature makes in life, whether a muscular adjustment or an intelligent
adjustment, there has got to be some registration effected in the
nervous system, some line of transit worn for nervous force to follow;
there has got to be a connection between certain nerve-centres before
the thing can be done, whether it is the acts of the viscera or the acts
of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and of course it is obvious
that if the creature has not many things to register in his nervous
system, if he has a life which is very simple, consisting of few actions
that are performed with great frequency, that animal becomes almost
automatic in his whole life; and all the nervous connections that need
to be made to enable him to carry on life get made during the fœtal
period [the period before birth] or during the egg period, and when he
comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work. As one result of
this, he does not learn from individual experience, but one generation
is like the preceding generations, with here and there some slight
modifications. But when you get the creature that has arrived at the
point where his experience has become varied, he has got to do a good
many things, and there is more or less individuality about them; and
many of them are not performed with the same minuteness and regularity,
so that there does not begin to be that automatism within the period
during which he is being developed and his form is taking on its
outlines. During prenatal life [before birth] there is not time enough
for all these nervous registrations, and so by degrees it comes about
that he is born with his nervous system perfectly capable only of making
him breathe and digest food,--of making him do the things absolutely
requisite for supporting life; instead of being born with a certain
number of definite developed capacities, he has a number of
potentialities which have got to be roused according to his own
individual experience. Pursuing that line of thought, it began after a
while to seem clear to me that the infancy of the animal in a very
undeveloped condition, with the larger part of his faculties in
potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct result of the
increase of intelligence, and I began to see that now we have two steps:
first, natural selection goes on increasing the intelligence; and
secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it makes a longer
infancy, a creature is born less developed, and therefore there comes
this plastic period during which he is more teachable. The capacity for
progress begins to come in, and you begin to get at one of the great
points in which man is distinguished from the lower animals, for one of
those points is undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any
one will say, with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our
period of infancy we should not be progressive. If we came into the
world with our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be
very much like another.
Then, looking around to see what are the other points which are most
important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes that
matter of the family. The family has adumbrations and foreshadowings
among the lower animals, but in general it may be said that while
mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have become established
those peculiar relationships which constitute what we know as the
family; and it is easy to see how the existence of helpless infants
would bring about just that state of things. The necessity of caring for
the infants would prolong the period of maternal affection, and would
tend to keep the father and mother and children together, but it would
tend especially to keep the mother and children together. This business
of the marital relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in
the primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of
civilization. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent,
belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the earlier stages the
knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and
the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male
parent, came to bring about the family and gradually to knit those
organizations which we know as clans.
Here we come to another stage, another step forward. The instant society
becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let these clans be
broken up and die out,--the clan becomes the chief object or care of
natural selection, because, if you destroy it you retrograde again, you
lose all you have gained; consequently, those clans in which the
primeval selfish instincts were so modified that the individual conduct
would be subordinated to some extent to the needs to the clan,--those
are the ones which would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way
you gradually get an external standard to which man has to conform his
conduct, and you get the germs of altruism and morality; and in the
prolonged affectionate relation between the mother and the infant you
get the opportunity for that development of altruistic feeling which,
once started in those relations, comes into play in the more general
relations, and makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which
keep society together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.
So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a very
considerable result. I had got these facts pretty clearly worked out,
and carried them around with me some years, before a fresh conclusion
came over me one day with a feeling of surprise. In the old days before
the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man regarded himself as the
centre of the universe. He used to entertain theological systems which
conformed to his limited knowledge of nature. The universe seemed to be
made for his uses, the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his
dwelling-place, he occupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to
give him light, etc. When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect
upon theology was certainly tremendous. I do not believe that justice
has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was made to
realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of dirt in the
universe, and that there were so many other worlds greater than this. It
was one of the first great shocks involved in the change from ancient to
modern scientific views, and I do not doubt it was responsible for a
great deal of the pessimistic philosophizing that came in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago--after thinking about
this manner in which man originated--that man occupies certainly just as
exceptional a position as before, if he is the terminal in a long series
of evolutionary events. If at the end of the long history of evolution
comes man, if this whole secular process has been going on to produce
this supreme object, it does not much matter what kind of a cosmical
body he lives on. He is put back into the old position of theological
importance, and in a much more intelligent way than in the old days when
he was supposed to occupy the centre of the universe. We are enabled to
say that while there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going on
through countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in the one case
where it is brought home to us we spell out an intelligible story, and
we do find things working along up to man as a terminal fact in the
whole process. This is indeed a consistent conclusion from Wallace's
suggestion that natural selection, in working toward the genesis of man,
began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of
physical changes. Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in
the history of the universe. It is no longer going to be necessary to
shape new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair,
when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take some other
animal's hide and make it into clothes. You have got to a new state of
things.
After I had put together all these additional circumstances with regard
to the origination of human society and the development of altruism, I
began to see a little further into the matter. It then began to appear
that not only is man the terminal factor in a long process of evolution,
but in the origination of man there began the development of the higher
psychical attributes, and those attributes are coming to play a greater
and greater part in the development of the human race. Just take this
mere matter of "altruism," as we call it. It is not a pretty word, but
must serve for want of a better. In the development of altruism from the
low point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together, up
to the point reached at the present day, there has been a notable
progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of improvement.
The progress has been all in the direction of bringing out what we call
the higher spiritual attributes. The feeling was now more strongly
impressed upon me than ever, that all these things tended to set the
whole doctrine of evolution into harmony with religion; that if the past
through which man had originated was such as has been described, then
religion was a fit and worthy occupation for man, and some of the
assumptions which underlie every system of religion must be true. For
example, with regard to the assumption that what we see of the present
life is not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the
question beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a
life eternal. When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to
say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common
sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to produce a
merely ephemeral result. But since then another argument has occurred to
me: that just at the time when the human race was beginning to come upon
the scene, when the germs of morality were coming in with the family,
when society was taking its first start, there came into the human
mind--how one can hardly say, but there did come--the beginnings of a
groping after something that lies outside and beyond the world of sense.
That groping after a spiritual world has been going on here for much
more than a hundred thousand years, and it has played an enormous part
in the history of mankind, in the whole development of human society.
Nobody can imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the
present time. Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom
that does not exist, or a reaching out after something that does exist,
but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has only been able to
gain a crude idea. And the latter seems a far more probable conclusion,
because, if it is not so, it constitutes a unique exception to all the
operations of evolution we know about. As a general thing in the whole
history of evolution, when you see any internal adjustment reaching out
toward something, it is in order to adapt itself to something that
really exists; and if the religious cravings of man constitute an
exception, they are the one thing in the whole process of evolution that
is exceptional and different from all the rest. And this is surely an
argument of stupendous and resistless weight.
I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in the
order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of illustration.
The net result of the whole is to put evolution in harmony with
religious thought,--not necessarily in harmony with particular religious
dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the great religious drift, so
that the antagonism which used to appear to exist between religion and
science is likely to disappear. So I think it will before a great while.
If you take the case of some evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is
perfectly sure that materialism accounts for everything (he has got it
all cut and dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is
really no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question
whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led him to
such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he started from some
purely arbitrary assumption, like the French materialists of the
eighteenth century, I have no doubt that the latter would be the true
explanation. There are a good many people who start on their theories of
evolution with these ultimate questions all settled to begin with. It
was the most natural thing in the world that after the first assaults of
science upon old beliefs, after a certain number of Bible stories and a
certain number of church doctrines had been discredited, there should be
a school of men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific
researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the
methods of physical science, and we will throw everything else
overboard." That was very much the state of mind of the famous French
atheists of the last century. But only think how chaotic nature was to
their minds compared to what she is to our minds to-day. Just think how
we have in the present century arrived where we can see the bearings of
one set of facts in nature as collated with another set of facts, and
contrast it with the view which even the greatest of those scientific
French materialists could take. Consider how fragmentary and how lacking
in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe we
see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be an atheistic
world. That hostility between science and religion continued as long as
religion was linked hand in hand with the ancient doctrine of special
creation. But now that the religious world has unmoored itself, now that
it is beginning to see the truth and beauty of natural science and to
look with friendship upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this
temporary antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of
regarding as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps
quicker than we realize.
There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
although I can only hint at it. Among the things that happened in that
dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase of his
powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense importance.
Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the
human race would never have become human if it had not been for the
hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggeration about that.
It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of
mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while
for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which
had developed hands and could manipulate things. It was a wonderful era
in the history of creation when that creature could take a club and use
it for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm. From that day to this,
the career of man has been that of a person who has operated upon his
environment in a different way from any animal before him. An era of
similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man learned how to
build a fire and cook his food. Here was another means of acting upon
the environment. Here was the beginning of the working of endless
physical and chemical changes through the application of heat, just as
the first use of the club or the crowbar was the beginning of an
enormous development in the mechanical arts.
Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past, when
ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found expression
in the crudest form of myths, the æsthetic sense was germinating
likewise. Away back in the glacial period you find pictures drawn and
scratched upon the reindeer's antler, portraitures of mammoths and
primitive pictures of the chase; you see the trinkets, the personal
decorations, proving beyond question that the æsthetic sense was there.
There has been an immense æsthetic development since then. And I believe
that in the future it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet
begun to realize. I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of his
thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations. This is
going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind. There is something
strongly educational and disciplinary in the mere dealing with matter,
whether it be in the manual training-school, whether it be in
carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and total depravity of inanimate
things, shaping them to your will, and also in learning to subject
yourself to their will (for sometimes you must do that in order to
achieve your conquests; in other words, you must humour their habits and
proclivities). In all this there is a priceless discipline, moral as
well as mental, let alone the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic
work a man does, he is doing that which in the very working has in it an
element of something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for
motives not very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of
which is the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself;
he is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer relations to
his fellow man.
In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude
labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour
which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence
behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of
skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence
is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will
be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products
have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and
shelter,--those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those
things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man
there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that
there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind this fact
most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate
machine.
THE NEW STUDY OF CHILDREN
PROFESSOR JAMES SULLY
[This eminent writer is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of
Mind and of Logic at University College, London. His works
published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, are "Illusions,"
"Outlines of Psychology with Special Reference to the Theory
of Education," "Teachers' Handbook of Psychology," "The Human
Mind," "Pessimism," "Children's Ways," and "Studies of
Childhood." From the last mentioned work, copyright by D.
Appleton & Co., the following is the introductory chapter.]
Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since
he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come
under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted
departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early
literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things
of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from
the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap, the
hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at
managing a certain baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his
rashness.
Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively
recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of
infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we
have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This
applies of course more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him
much of the boy's contempt for small things, and he needed ages of
education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could
perceive the charm of infantile ways.
One of the first males to do justice to this attractive subject was
Rousseau. He made short work with the theological dogma that the child
is born morally depraved, and can only be made good by miraculous
appliances. His watchword, return to nature, included a reversion to the
infant as coming virginal and unspoilt by man's tinkering from the hands
of its Maker. To gain a glimpse of this primordial beauty before it was
marred by man's awkward touch was something, and so Rousseau set men in
the way of sitting reverently at the feet of infancy, watching and
learning.
For us of to-day, who have learned to go to the pure springs of nature
for much of our spiritual refreshment, the child has acquired a high
place among the things of beauty. Indeed, the grace of childhood may
almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth
has stooped over his cradle intent on catching, ere they passed, the
"visionary gleams" of "the glories he hath known." Blake, R. L.
Stevenson, and others, have tried to put into language his
day-dreamings, his quaint fancyings. Dickens and Victor Hugo have shown
us something of his delicate quivering heart-strings; Swinburne has
summed up the divine charm of "children's ways and wiles." The page of
modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our
child-admiration.
Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back
admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us
so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions
is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex.
Among other sources of this charm we may discern the perfect serenity,
the happy "insouciance" [unconcern] of the childish mind. The note of
world-complaint in modern life has penetrated into most domains, yet it
has not, one would hope, penetrated into the charmed circle of childish
experience. Childhood has, no doubt, its sad aspect:
Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe,
Tutored by pain each source of pain to know:
neglect and cruelty may bring much misery into the first bright years.
Yet the very instinct of childhood to be glad in its self-created world,
an instinct which with consummate art Victor Hugo keeps warm and quick
in the breast of the half-starved ill-used child Cosette, secures for it
a peculiar blessedness. The true nature-child, who has not become
used-up, is happy, untroubled with the future, knowing nothing of the
misery of disillusion. As, with hearts chastened by many experiences, we
take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasance, we seem to be
taken back to a real golden age. With Amiel, we say: "The little of
paradise which still remains on earth is due to his presence." Yet the
thought, which the same moment brings, of the flitting of the nursery
visions, of the coming storm and stress, adds a pathos to the spectacle,
and we feel as Heine felt when he wrote:
I look at you and sadness
Steals into my heart.
Other and strangely unlike feelings mingle with this caressing,
half-pitiful admiration. We moderns are given to relieving the strained
attitude of reverence and pity by momentary outbursts of humorous
merriment. The child, while appealing to our admiration and our pity,
makes a large and many-voiced appeal also to our sense of the laughter
in things. It is indeed hard to say whether he is most amusing when
setting at naught in his quiet, lordly way, our most extolled views, our
ideas of what is true and false, of the proper uses of things, and so
forth, or when labouring in his perfectly self-conceived fashion to
overtake us and be as experienced and as conventional as ourselves. This
ever new play of droll feature in childish thought and action forms one
of the deepest sources of delight for the modern lover of childhood.
With the growth of a poetic or sentimental interest in childhood there
has come a new and different kind of interest. Ours is a scientific age,
and science has cast its inquisitive eye on the infant. We want to know
what happens in these first all-decisive two or three years of human
life, by what steps exactly the wee amorphous thing takes shape and
bulk, both physically and mentally. And we can now speak of the
beginning of a careful and methodical investigation of child-nature, by
men trained in scientific observation. This line of inquiry, started by
physicians, as the German Sigismund, in connection with their special
professional aims, has been carried on by a number of fathers and others
having access to the infant, among whom it may be enough to name Darwin
and Preyer.
This eagerness to know what the child is like, an eagerness illustrated
further by the number of reminiscences of early years recently
published, is the outcome of a many-sided interest which it may be worth
while to analyze.
The most obvious source of interest in the doings of infancy lies in its
primitiveness. At the cradle we are watching the beginnings of things,
the first tentative thrustings forward into life. Our modern science is
before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as
to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the
outcome of these beginnings. The same kind of curiosity which prompts
the geologist to get back to the first stages in the building up of the
planet, or the biologist to search out the pristine forms of life, is
beginning to urge the student of man to discover by a careful study of
infancy the way in which human life begins to take its characteristic
forms.
The appearance of Darwin's name among those who have deemed the child
worthy of study suggests that the subject is closely connected with
natural history. However man in his proud maturity may be related to
Nature, it is certain that in his humble inception he is immersed in
Nature and saturated with her. As we all know, the lowest races of
mankind stand in close proximity to the animal world. The same is true
of the infants of civilized races. Their life is outward and visible,
forming a part of nature's spectacle; reason and will, the noble
prerogatives of humanity, are scarce discernible; sense, appetite,
instinct, these animal functions seem to sum up the first year of human
life.
To the evolutionist, moreover, the infant exhibits a still closer
kinship to the natural world. In the successive stages of fœtal
development he sees the gradual unfolding of human lineaments out of a
widely typical animal form. And even after birth he can discern new
evidences of this genealogical relation of the "lord" of creation to his
inferiors. How significant, for example, is the fact recently
established by a medical man, Dr. Louis Robinson, that the new-born
infant is able just like the ape to suspend his whole weight by grasping
a small horizontal rod.
Yet even as nature-object for the biologist the child presents
distinctive attributes. Though sharing in animal instinct, he shares in
it only to a very small extent. The most striking characteristic of the
new-born offspring of man is its unpreparedness for life. Compare with
the young of other animals the infant so feeble and incapable. He can
neither use his limbs nor see the distance of objects as a new-born
chick or calf is able to do. His brain-centres are, we are told, in a
pitiable state of undevelopment--and are not even securely encased
within their bony covering. Indeed, he resembles for all the world a
public building which has to be opened by a given date, and is found
when the day arrives to be in a humiliating state of incompleteness.
This fact of the special helplessness of the human offspring at birth,
of its long period of dependence on parental or other aids--a period
which, probably, tends to grow longer as civilization advances--is rich
in biological and sociological significance. For one thing, it
presupposes a specially high development of the protective and fostering
instincts in the human parents, and particularly the mother--for if the
helpless wee thing were not met by these instincts, what would become
of our race? It is probable, too, as Mr. Spencer and others have argued,
that the institution by nature of this condition of infantile weakness
has reacted on the social affections of the race, helping to develop our
pitifulness for all frail and helpless things.
Nor is this all. The existence of the infant, with its large and
imperative claims, has been a fact of capital importance in the
development of social customs. Ethnological researches show that
communities have been much exercised with the problem of infancy, have
paid it the homage due to its supreme sacredness, girding it about with
a whole group of protective and beneficial customs.
Enough has been said, perhaps, to show the far-reaching significance of
babyhood to the modern savant. It is hardly too much to say that it has
become one of the most eloquent of nature's phenomena, telling us at
once of our affinity to the animal world, and of the forces by which our
race has, little by little, lifted itself to so exalted a position above
this world; and so it has happened that not merely to the perennial
baby-worshipper, the mother, and not merely to the poet touched with the
mystery of far off things, but to the grave man of science the infant
has become a centre of lively interest.
Nevertheless, it is not to the mere naturalist that the babe reveals all
its significance. Physical organism as it seems to be more than
anything else, hardly more than a vegetative thing indeed, it carries
with it the germ of a human consciousness, and this consciousness begins
to expand and to form itself into a truly human shape from the very
beginning. And here a new source of interest presents itself. It is the
human psychologist, the student of those impalpable, unseizable,
evanescent phenomena which we call "state of consciousness," who has a
supreme interest, and a scientific property in these first years of a
human existence. What is of most account in these crude tentatives at
living after the human fashion is the play of mind, the first
spontaneous manifestations of recognition, of reasoning expectation, of
feelings of sympathy and antipathy, of definite persistent purpose.
Rude, inchoate, vague enough, no doubt, are these first groping
movements of a human mind: yet of supreme value to the psychologist just
because they are the first. If, reflects the psychologist, he can only
get at this baby's consciousness so as to understand what is passing
there, he will be in an infinitely better position to find his way
through the intricacies of the adult consciousness. It may be, as we
shall see by-and-by, that the baby's mind is not so perfectly simple, so
absolutely primitive as it at first looks. Yet it is the simplest type
of human consciousness to which we can have access. The investigator of
this consciousness can never take any known sample of the animal mind as
his starting point if for no other reason than this, that while
possessing many of the elements of the human mind, it presents these in
so unlike, so peculiar a pattern.