Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/289

Rh, its short waking-time being principally occupied in feeding, in accumulating the material for its structural and functional growth. Its acts consist of sucking, crying, and kicking, and of using to some extent its eyes and ears. It does not at first see any thing as an object; it merely undergoes the subjective sensation of light; its retina and sensory ganglia are stimulated by light; and, if the light be too bright and the stimulation too strong, it testifies the pain experienced, by contracting the eyelids and crying. On the other hand, it is pleased by being brought before a lighted candle or other gently-stimulating light. The acts very soon indicate pleasure or the reverse, and we know whether the child is pleased or not long before it can tell us. It is pained by cold or hunger or bodily suffering, by a too vivid light, by a loud or harsh sound, as it shows by crying, by movement of its body and facial muscles. Its pleasure is denoted by laughing, kicking, and corresponding movement and expression of face. It derives pleasure also from excitation of its centres of motion, from being tossed, dandled, and rocked, while rough and violent movements cause no less pain and discomfort. We see, then, in such a child, manifestations of a very considerable amount of feeling—feeling which is at this stage entirely bodily, or at the most sensory, arising from the exercise of the senses.

A little later, and we find that the child can discriminate between the voice and face of its mother or nurse and those of a stranger, deriving pleasure from the one and pain from the other, and evincing memory. It remembers what it sees and hears, and what it experiences; and as the original events were pleasant or painful, so are the recollections of them, as we learn from the manifestations it exhibits. We know nothing of a child's inner life except from these manifestations, for it tells us nothing. All we learn is from its facta, its acts; it does not yet talk, and, when it commences, its talk is only of concrete objects. It has no abstract terms or generalizations in its vocabulary.

If we trace the development of this child, we see how its pleasures and pains, which at first are entirely corporeal, merge by barely perceptible degrees into mental feelings, and how these expand from mere feelings into the emotions of adult life. Its feeling is being perpetually evoked by every thing that it sees and hears. By turns it displays anger, fear, pain, or delight, and the feeling called up by one object is only to be allayed by the substitution of another, which, stimulating another centre, will by such stimulation rouse another feeling. If we look at a boy of three years, healthy and strong, whose sleep and appetite are good, and whose nerve-centres are full of force, we see that his whole waking-time is employed in the keen enjoyment of spending his nerve-force in incessant motion and play. There is no work in him: his life is all active amusement, emotive movement. He exhibits rage, terror, jealousy, wonder, vanity, love, the desire for