Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/524

you may more fully appreciate what I believe to be the fact of mental development going on with diminishing rapidity, I should like to picture to you briefly some of the things which the child achieves during the first year of its life. When the child is born, it is undoubtedly supplied with a series of the indispensable physiological functions, all those which are concerned with the taking in and utilizing of food. The organs of digestion, assimilation, circulation and excretion are all functionally active at birth. The sense organs are also able to work. Sense of taste and of smell are doubtfully present. It is maintained that they are already active, but they do not show themselves except in response to very strong stimulation. Almost the only additional faculty which the child has is that of motion, but the motions of the new-born baby are perfectly irregular, accidental, purposeless, except the motions which are connected with the function of sucking, upon which the child depends for its nourishment. The instinct of sucking, the baby does have at birth. It might be described as almost the only equipment beyond the mere physiological working of its various organs. But at one month we find that this uninformed baby has made a series of important discoveries. It has learned that there are sensations, that they are interesting; it will attend to them. You all know how a baby of one month will stare; the eyes will be fastened upon some bright and interesting object. At the end of a month the baby shows evidences of having ideas and bringing them into correlation, association, as one more correctly expresses it, because already after one month, when held in the proper position in the arms, it shows that it expects to be fed. There is, then, already evidence and trace of memory. At two months much more has been achieved. The baby evidently learns to expect things. It expects to be fed at certain times; it has made the great discovery of the existence of time. And it has made the discovery of the existence of space, for it will follow, to some extent, the bright light; it will hold its head in a certain position to catch a sound apparently from one side; or to see in a certain direction. The sense of space and time in the baby's mind is, of course, very imperfect, doubtless, at this time, but those two non-stuff realities about which the metaphysicians discuss so much, the two realities of existence which are not material, the baby at this time has discovered. Perhaps, had some great and wonderfully endowed person existed who preserved the memory of his own psychological history, of his development during babyhood, we should have been spared the gigantic efforts of the metaphysicians to explain how the notions of space and time arose. Without knowing how, the baby has acquired them, and has already become a rudimentary metaphysician. We see, also, at the end of the third month, that the baby has made another remarkable discovery. It has found not merely that its muscles will contract and jerk and throw its parts about, which is doubtless earlier a great delight to it; but that