a double idea of their bodily self, the trunk and limbs which may die and be put in the ground, and the head the seat of the soul which lives on and passes into heaven. But of this more later on. Nay, more. A child may indulge the fancy—playfully, at least—that the several parts of the body are so many different bodily selves. Laura Bridgman would amuse herself by spelling a word wrong with one hand, slap that hand with the other, and then proceed to spell it right, laughing at her game. Here the offending hand was for the moment personified and given a sort of independent existence.
Very interesting in connection with the formation of the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to expect a child when first placed before a mirror to recognize his own face. He will smile at the reflection as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If held in the nurse's or father's arms to a glass when about six months old, a baby will at once show that he recognizes the image of the familiar face of the latter by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recognize his own. He appears at first and for some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling as to a stranger or even kissing it, and then trying to grasp it with the hand, turning up the glass or putting his hand behind it in order to see what is really there. Darwin has shown that monkeys behave very much in the same way before a mirror. Little by little he gets used to it, and then, by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the image, as when he notices the reflection of his pinafore or of the movement of his hands as he points—partly, no doubt, by a kind of inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the mirror—he reaches the idea that the reflection belongs to himself. By the sixtieth week Preyer's boy had associated the name of his mother with her image, pointing to it when asked where she was. By the twenty-first month he did the same thing in the case of his own image.[1]
An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to touch it. Some children, on first noticing their own and other people's shadows, are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time the strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of course and referred to the sun.
We know that the phenomena of reflections and shadows, along with those of dreams, had much to do with the development, in the primitive thought of the race, of the animistic conception that everything has a double nature and existence. Do
- ↑ See the very full account of the mirror experiment in Preyer's book (3te Auflage), p. 459 et seq.
