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 child-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 mighty 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 the apostle of nature, Jean Jacques Rousseau. He made short work of 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 taught men to sit 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, his graces may almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth has stooped over his cradle intent on catching ere it passed the "visionary gleams" of "the glories he hath known. 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 of the child-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 blasé is happy, untroubled by the future, knowing nothing of the nausea of disillusion. we with hearts chastened by many experiences take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasaunce, we seem to be carried back to a real golden age. With Amiel, we say, "Le peu de paradis que nous aperçevons encore sur la terre est du à sa présence." Yet the thought, which the

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same moment

brings, of the fleeting of the nurseryvisions, of the coming storm and stress, adds a pathos to the spectacle, and we feel as Heine felt when he wrote:

"Ich schau' dich an, und Wehmuth
Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein."

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 child-reminiscences 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 man. Their life is outward and visible, forming a part of nature's spectacle ; reason and will, the noble prerogatives of human life, 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 with the natural world. In the suc

cessive stages of foetal 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. Lionel 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. Compared with the young of other animals the infant is 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 braincentres are, we are told, in a pitiable state of undevelopment, and are not even securely encased within their bony covering. Indeed, he suggests 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, more 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.

*The Nineteenth Century (1891). Cf. the somewhat fantastic and not too serious paper by S. S. Buckman on "Babies and Monkeys" n the same journal (1894).

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 beneficent customs.

Nevertheless, it is not to the mere naturalist that the babe reveals all its significance. Physical organism as it seems, 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 true 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 "states 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 fashiou 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. For psychology has taken to the genetic path, and busies itself with trying to trace back the tangled web of human consciousness to its earliest and simplest pattern. If, reflects the psychologist, he can only get at this baby-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 that the baby-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 the human consciousness can never take any known sample of the animal mind as his starting

In this genetic tracing back of the complexities of man's mental life to their primitive elements in the child's consciousness questions of peculiar interest will arise. A problem which, though having a venerable antiquity, is still full of meaning, concerns the precise relation of the higher forms of intelligence and of sentiment to the elementary facts of the individual's life-experience. Are we to regard all our ideas, even that of God, as woven by the mind out of its experiences as Locke thought, or have we certain "innate ideas" from the first? Locke thought he could settle this point by observing children. To-day, when the philosophic emphasis is laid, not on the date of appearance of the "innate" intuition, but on its originality and spontaneity, this method of interrogating the child-mind may seem less promising. Yet, if of less philosophical importance than was once supposed, it has a high psychological importance. There are certain questions, such as how we come to see things at a distance from us, which can be approached most advantageously by a study of the childmind. In like manuer, I believe the growth of a moral sentiment, of that feeling of reverence for duty to which Kant gave so eloquent an expression, can only be understood by the most painstaking observation of the mental activities of the first years.

There is, however, another and in a sense a larger source of psychological interest in studying the processes and development of the infant mind.

was pointed out above that to the evolutional biologist the child exhibits man in his kinship with the lower sentient world. This same evolutional point of view enables the psychologist to connect the unfolding of an infant's mind with something which has gone be fore, with the mental history of the race. According to this way of looking at infancy the successive phases of its mental life are a brief résumé of the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species. The periods

dominated successively by sense and appetite, by blind wonder and superstitious fancy, by a calmer observation and a juster reasoning about things, these steps mark the pathway both of the child-mind and of the race-mind.

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This being so the first years of a child, with their imperfect verbal expression, their crude fanciful ideas, their seizures by rage and terror, their absorption in the present moment, acquire a new and antiquarian interest. They mirror for us, in a diminished, distorted reflection no doubt, the probable condition of primitive man. Sir John Lubbock and other anthropologists have told us, the intellectual and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and children are numerous and close. When, for example, a child is affected with terror at the first sight of the vast surging sea, or when he talks of having seen his dream" on his pillow," or when he alternately treats his toy idols with credulous affection and sceptical disgust, do we not seem to see reflections of the savage mind? When, again, a child invents a rain-god or rainer," or explains thunder as a noise made by God hammering something or treading heavily on the floor of the sky, are we not carried back to the hoary mythologies of the race?

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Yet this way of viewing childhood is not merely of anthropological interest. In spite of the fashionable Weismanuism of the hour there are evolutionists who hold that in the early manifested tendencies of the child we can discern signs of a hereditary trans. mission of the effects of ancestral experiences and activities. His first manifestations of rage, for example, are pretty certainly a survival of actions of remote ancestors in their life and death struggles. The impulse of obedience, which is as much a characteristic of the child as that of disobedience, may in like manner be regarded as a transmitted rudiment of a habit slowly acquired by generations of socialized ancestors. This idea of an increment of intelligence and moral disposition earned for the individua), not by himself but by his ancestors, has its peculiar interest. It gives a new meaning to human progress to suppose that

the dawn of infant intelligence, instead of being a return to a primitive darkness, contains from the first a faint light reflected on it from the lamp of racial intelligence which has preceded; that, instead of a return to the race's starting-point, to the lowest form of the school of experience, it is a start in a higher form, the promotion being a reward conferred on the small beginner for the exertions of his ancestors. Psychological observation will be well employed in scanning the features of the infant mind, in order to see whether they yield evidence of such ancestral dowering.

So much with respect to the rich and varied scientific interest attaching to the movements of the child-mind. It It only remains to touch on a third main interest in childhood, the practical or educational interest. The modern world, while erecting the baby into an object of æsthetic contemplation, while bringing to bear on him the bull's-eye lamp of scientific investigation, has become sorely troubled by the momentous problem of rearing him. What was once a matter of instinct and unthinking rule-of-thumb has become the subject of profound and perplexing discussion. Mothers--the right sort of mothers, that is feel that they must know au fond this small speechless creature, which they are called upon to direct into the safe road of manhood. And professional teachers, more particularly the beginners in the work of training children, whose task is in some respects the most difficult and the most honorable, have come to see that a clear insight into child-nature and its spontaneous movements must precede any intelligent attempt to work beneficially upon this nature. In this way the teacher has lent his support to the savant and the psychologist in their investigation of infancy. More particularly he has betaken him to the psychologist in order to discover more of the native tendencies and the governing laws of that unformed childmind which it is his in a special manner to form.

The awakening in the modern mind of this keen and varied interest in childhood has led, and is destined to lead still more, to the observation of

infantile ways. This observation will, of course, be of very different value according as it subserves the contemplation of the humorous or other æsthetically valuable aspect of child-life, or as it is directed toward a scientific understanding of child-nature. Pretty anecdotes of children which tickle the emotions may or may not add to our insight into the peculiar mechanisni of their minds. There is no necessary connection between smiling at infantile drolleries and understanding the laws of infantile intelligence. Indeed the mood of merriment, if too exuberant, will pretty certainly swamp for the moment any desire to understand.

The observation which is to further understanding, which is to be acceptable to science, must itself be scientific. That is to say, it must be at once guided by foreknowledge, especially directed to what is essential in a phenomenon and its surroundings or conditions, and perfectly exact. If anybody supposes this to be easy he should first try his hand at the work, and then compare what he has seen with what Darwin or Preyer has been able to discover.

How difficult this is may be seen even with reference to the outward physical part of the phenomena to be observed. Ask any mother untrained in observation to note the first appearance of that complex facial movement which we call a smile, and you know what kind of result you are likely to get. The phenomena of a child's mental life, even on its physical and visible side, are of so subtle and fugitive a character that only a fine and quick observation is able to cope with them. But observation of children is never merely seeing. Even the smile has to be interpreted as a smile by a process of imaginative inference. Many careless onlookers would say that a baby smiles in the first days from very happiness, when another and simpler explanation of the movement is forthcoming. Similarly it wants much fine judgment to say whether an infant is merely stumbling accidentally on an articulate sound or is imitating your sound. A glance at some of the best memoirs will show how enormously difficult it is to be sure of a right in