Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/718

646 like what we call sense-experience. Yet, however dim, confused, and rudimentary the baby's consciousness may be, the in-going nerve currents produce more or less definite movements, and, as consciousness becomes more highly evolved, not merely do the impressions of sense produce movements, but the ideas also, or copies of those impressions, acquire control over the body. The later history of volition merely records the steps by which the inner control, through its gradually increasing complexity, comes to supersede the outer. In the earlier years of life the child may almost be said to be a slave to his environment. His conduct is controlled for the most part either by what he actually sees and hears or by his most recent memories and immediate anticipations. The remote past and the distant future affect him but little: he is a creature of the present. Consequently, one can see the motor effects of sensations and ideas more directly in children than in the adult. At first definite responses are limited to a few reflexes. Sucking, winking, crying, swallowing, clutching, and one or two more, constitute the capital with which the child begins life. Besides these we find a mass of random movements out of which all later forms are evolved. At a somewhat later period the child enters upon the imitative stage, to which so much attention has been attracted of late; no sooner does he see an act performed than he attempts to do it himself. Of the mental and physiological conditions which lie at the basis of imitation we know very little. It probably marks a period in which the visible appearances of the grosser bodily movements are entering into associative union with those thoughts of how the movements feel when performed which are the immediate psychical antecedents of the movements which they represent. "Naughtiness," in children passing through this stage, is frequently nothing more than sheer inability to overcome the imperative suggestions of the environment by the relatively feeble thoughts which its parents' commands suggest. For children, example is indeed better than precept.

As the child grows older and his mind becomes more richly stored with memories, as his hereditary instincts come to view, and his increasing power of imagination enables him to picture the future more distinctly, he is little by little emancipated from his slavery to the present. Yet in many children marked suggestibility persists to a quite late period. In the normal adult the store of memories has become so rich and the power of anticipating the future so great that the primitive suggestibility seems almost to have disappeared. The man's conduct is no longer mainly controlled by this or by that suggestion of his environment, but springs naturally from the steady stream of thoughts and purposes that fill his mind. No suggestion can enter his