Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/552

536 But whoever imagines this extremely artificial and fictitious mental process to be the reasoning of an infant, has surely failed to make proper use of even the most superficial observation of the imitative function in its early developments. The infant usually begins explicitly and persistently to imitate just before or during the last quarter of the first year of its life. Long before this time, however, it has shown not only various more or less capricious and unconscious imitations, but, as every observant mother knows, an interest in persons wholly different from the interest that it shows in other things. This interest is doubtless in part due to its deep experience of the importance of the persons of its environment for its welfare. They feed it, and supply all its other bodily comforts. By mere association it of course thus learns to regard their faces and movements as peculiarly noteworthy objects. But that, in addition to these results of mere association, there is a genuinely instinctive disposition in the infant, the instinctive disposition of the being destined to social life,—the disposition to react to persons as it reacts to no other objects,—this I cannot very seriously doubt. The child's interest in expressions of face, its subtle, unconscious responses to the moods and to the current general nervous conditions of its nurse or mother, its delights, and later its terrors in the contemplation of strange persons, these things go far beyond what the mere association of ideas can warrant or explain. Instinct begins the social life,—instinct that leads to responses of the keenest interest in persons,—in advance of a time when the child can have any clear idea either of itself or of anybody else, as a conscious self, or as a person at all.

Then comes explicit imitation,—an unquestionably complex process, in which several different instinctive factors are most subtly interwoven with the effects of experience in a way which psychology, as I have said, still but very ill comprehends. The child is now not only fascinated with the faces and movements of its elders. It tries to do what these elders do. The very uncertainty of its attempts shows how small an idea it yet has of itself or of its own powers. Its consciousness, in this early