THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD.*

A REVIEW.

BY JAMES SULLY, M.A.

AMONG the many new fields of investigation which modern science has opened up, there is none which is more inviting than that of infant psychology. The beginnings of all things are full of interest, as we see by the amount of inquiry now devoted to the origin of human institutions and ideas, and all the various forms of life. And the beginnings of a human mind, the first dim stages in the development of man's God-like reason, ought surely to be most interesting of all. And infancy has its own peculiar charm. There is an exquisite poetry in the spontaneous promptings of the unsophisticated spirit of the child. So far removed at times from our one-sided prejudiced views, so high above our low conventional standards are the little one's intuitions of his new world. Childhood has its unlovely and unworthy side no doubt. Still I cannot think that any close observer of infancy ever thoroughly believed in its total depravity. Possibly, indeed, to a perfectly candid mind its fresh and striking observations about things, which, though often bizarre, are, on the whole, thoroughly sound and wholesome, are always apt to suggest the pleasing fancy of Plato and Wordsworth, that the little newcomer brings from his ante-natal abode ideas and feelings which lie high above the plane of earthly experience. However this be, no thoroughly open and unspoiled mind can fail to learn much that is good from a close study of childhood. This is the period when even very ordinary mortals display something remarkable. Perhaps indeed no healthy child has ever failed to present some new mental or moral phenomenon, to impress, amuse, or instruct, if only the appreciating eyes had been there to see.

But it is not with the poetic side of infancy that we are here specially concerned. We have to look on the opening germ of intelligence from the colder point of view of science. Not that the savant need be insensible to the aesthetic charm of his subject. A botanist ought perhaps to feel something of the rich store of loveliness which lies enclosed within the tiny confines of a wayside flower. Scientific curiosity often leaps into full and vigorous life under the genial, vivifying influence of a glowing admiration.

* "The First Three Years of Childhood." By BERNARD PEREZ, translated and edited by ALICE M. CHRISTIE, pp. 316, cr. 8vo. Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Price 4s. 6d.

And a man who has a keen eye for all the pretty and humorous traits of infant life is all the better qualified for a close scientific observation of its processes. Only that in this case the æsthetic interest must be subordinated to the scientific.

The science which is specially concerned with the baby mind is Psychology. It is only the psychologist who can pretend to record and interpret all its strange ways. And, on the other hand, the domain of infant life is of peculiar interest to the psychologist. True, he can study in other ways the manner in which the human mind behaves, and the laws which bind together its sequent movements. He has a mind of his own, which is directly accessible to his internal vision; and there are the minds of his friends and acquaintances, about which he can know a good deal too, always provided that they are quite open and confiding. Still, he cannot dispense with the young unformed minds of infants. His business, like that of all scientific workers, is to explain the complex in terms of the simple, to trace back the final perfectly-shaped result to the first rude beginnings. In order to do this, he must make a careful study of the early phases of mental life, and these manifest themselves directly under his eye in each new infant.

Some of the gravest questions relating to man's nature and destiny carry us back to the observation of infancy. Take, for instance, the warmly-discussed question, whether conscience is an innate faculty-each man's possession anterior to and independently of all the external human influences, authority, discipline, moral education, which go to shape it; or whether, on the contrary, it is a mere outgrowth from the impressions received in the course of this training. Nothing seems so likely to throw light on this burning question as a painstaking observation of the first years of life.

This, however, is not the whole of the significance of infancy to the modern psychologist. We are learning to connect the individual life with that of the race, and this again with the collective life of all sentient creatures. The doctrine of evolution bids us view the unfolding of a human intelligence to-day as conditioned and prepared by long ages of human experience, and still longer cycles of animal experience. The civilized individual is thus a memento, a kind of short-hand record of nature's farreceding work of organizing, or building up living conscious structures. And according to this view the successive stages of the mental life of the individual roughly answer to the periods of this extensive process of organization-vegetal, animal, human, civilized life. This being so, the first years of the child are of a peculiar antiquarian interest.

Here we may note the points of contact of man's proud reason with the lowly intelligence of the brutes. In the most ordinary child we may see a new dramatic representation of the great

cosmic action, the laborious emergence of intelligence out of its shell of animal sense and appetite.

Yet it must not be supposed that the interest here is wholly historical or archæological. For in thus detecting in the developmental processes of the child's mind an epitome of human and animal evolution, we learn the better to understand those processes. We are able to see in such a simple phenomenon as an infant's responsive smile a product of far-reaching activities lying outside the individual existence. In the light of the new doctrine of evolution, the early period of individual development, which is pre-eminently the domain of instinct, that is to say, of tendencies and impulses which cannot be referred to the action of the preceding circumstances of the individual,—is seen to be the region which bears the clearest testimony to this preparatory work of the race. It is in infancy that we are least indebted to our individual exertions, mental as well as bodily, and that our debt to our progenitors seems heaviest. In the rapidity with which the infant co-ordinates external impressions and movements, as in learning to follow a light with the eyes, or stretch out the hand to seize an object, and with which feelings of fear, anger, etc., attach themselves to objects and persons, we can plainly trace the play of heredity that law by which each new individual starts on his life course enriched by a legacy of ancestral experience.

Viewed in this light, infant psychology is seen to be closely related to other departments of the science. To begin with, it has obvious points of contact with what is known as the psychology of race (Völkerpsychologie). The first years of the child answer indeed to the earliest known stages of human history. How curiously do the naïve conceptions of nature, the fanciful animistic ideas of things, and the rude emotions of awe and terror, which there is good reason to attribute to our earliest human ancestors, reflect themselves in the language of the child! It is probable indeed that inquiries into the beginnings of human culture, the origin of language, of primitive ideas and institutions, might derive much more help than they have yet done from a close scrutiny of the events of childhood.

Again, it is evident that the psychology of the infant borders on animal psychology. The child's love of animals points to a special facility in understanding their ways; and this, again, indicates a certain community of nature. The intelligence of children and of animals has this in common, that each is simple and direct, unencumbered with the fruit of wide comparison and abstract reflection, keen and incisive within its own narrow compass. Both the child and the brute are exposed by their ignorance to similar risks of danger and deception; both show the same instincts of attachment and trustfulness. study of the one helps the understanding of the other.

And so a
The man

or woman who sees most clearly into the workings of a child's mind will, other things being equal, understand best the ways of animals, and vice versa.

There is one particular aspect of this relation between infant and animal psychology which calls for special notice. The baby contrasts strongly with the young of the lower animals in the meagreness of its equipment for life. Though, as observed before, the child reaps the heritage of the past in instinctive germs of capacity, these are far less conspicuous, far less perfect and selfsufficing than the unlearnt aptitudes of young animals. The young chick seems able to co-ordinate the movements of its head with visual impressions so perfectly from the very first that it can aim with accuracy at so small an object as a grain of corn. The young kitten displays quite an experienced and mature hostility to the hereditary foes of its species. There is nothing corresponding to this in the case of human offspring. The baby has to begin life in the most pitiable state of helplessness. For a year and more he cannot execute one of the most important and wide-spread functions of animal life-namely, locomotion. And this prolonged period of helplessness has a deeply interesting significance from the point of view of the evolutionist. The backwardness of the human offspring, as compared with the forwardness of the animal, is only a striking illustration of a general law or tendency of evolution. As creatures rise in the scale of organization they have to adapt their actions to a wider and wider variety of circumstances and actions of the environment. In the lower grades of animal life there is much more sameness and routine just because there is much more simplicity. In the higher grades, actions, having to adapt themselves to more complex and changeful surroundings, are more varied, or undergo more numerous and extensive modifications: contrast the actions performed by the bee in obtaining its food with those carried out by the fox. And the capability of thus varying or modifying actions is the result of individual experience and education. Hence, as the variability of the actions of life increases, so does the area of individual learning or acquisition, as distinct from that of inherited aptitude or instinct. And since the range and variability of human actions are immeasurably greater than those of the most intelligent animal performances, we find that the infant is least equipped for his earthly pilgrimage, and has most to do in the way of finding out how to live.

And here we seem to touch on the more practical side of our subject. To the helplessness of the infant there correspond those instincts of tendance, protection, and guidance which, though discernible in the lower animals, are only highly developed in man; and which, while they are seen most conspicuously in the human mother, are shared in by all adults, and underlie the long and tedious processes of education. It is not only the theoretic

psychologist who needs to study infantine ways; it is the practical psychologist that is to say, the educator. The first three or four years of life supply the golden harvest to which every scientific educationist should go to reap his facts. For the cardinal principle of the modern educational theory is, that systematic training should watch the spontaneous movements of the child's mind, and adapt its processes to these. And it is in the first years of life that the spontaneous tendencies show themselves most distinctly. It is in this period, before the example and direct instruction of others have had time to do much in modifying and restraining innate tendency, that we can most distinctly spy out the characteristics of the child. It is the infant who tells us most unmistakably how the young intelligence proceeds in groping its way out of darkness into light. It is an historical fact, that the supreme necessity in education of setting out with training the senses and the faculty of observation, was discovered by a close consideration of the direction which children's mental activity spontaneously follows. By sitting at the feet of nature and conning the ways of untaught childhood we may learn that all the essential functions of intelligence, separation or analysis, comparison, discrimination, etc., come into play under the stimulating force of a strong external impression. In the act of holding and looking at its brightly-coloured toy the infant is already showing himself to have a distinctively human mind, and to be on the road to abstract reflection or thought. It is during that prolonged gaze that the first rude tentatives in distinguishing and relating the parts and qualities of things are effected. And the object-lesson, properly conceived, is nothing but a methodical development of the mental processes which are involved in every serious effort of infantine inspection.

Nor is it only on the intellectual side that this study of the infant mind is of moment to the teacher. It is in the first three or four years of life that we have the key to the emotional and moral nature of the young. If we want to know how a child feels about things, what objects and articles bring him most pleasure, we must watch him at his self-prompted play and overhear his uncontrolled talk. It seems self-evident indeed that if the teacher is to adapt his method of training so far as may be to the tastes and predilections of the pupil, he must have made a preliminary study of these in their unprompted and unfettered expression. If the study be deferred to school life it will never be full or exact. The artificial character of even the brightest school surroundings offers too serious an obstacle to the free play of childish likings.

Enough has been said, perhaps, to show that the observation and interpretation of the infant mind are at once a matter of great theoretic and practical importance. And now comes the question: By whom can this line of research be best pursued? The conditions