The very distinction between the sexes itself that we are in the habit of making is a case in point, for the behavior and treatment of boys and girls during this period differs far more than do their bodies. Boys are traditionally supposed to be boys and girls girls, and this helps greatly to make them different. But the influence of social considerations does not cease here. Consider, for example, the result of urban conditions on the tendency to form gangs; or the yeoman service performed by the Boy Scout movement in turning the gang spirit to social account; or the effects of a child's reading upon the kind of group relations he pictures as desirable; or the pervasive influence of his home life in settling what manner of person he shall be.

3

(4) Adolescence (beginning somewhere around the fourteenth year). This is the period of the romance, when the dreamer's interests again focus on a single individual, and the sex of the companion at last becomes important. Magnificent fantasies of courage and renunciation are conjured up, floods of affectivity released, and mighty resolutions formed. The specific content of the daydream need by no means be connected with sex, but the association of the thinly veiled symbolisms with the new energies surging within the organism is usually apparent. The period of adolescence is fairly familiar to us as a general phenomenon, and no further description of it need be attempted here, a fuller discussion of the topic being reserved for the following chapter.

We have now provided a general conspectus of the ground to be covered, and may therefore turn to the discussion of some of the more important early achievements of development—a discussion which will be prefaced by an inventory of the infant's equipment as we find him at birth.

The baby at birth.

The baby seems more highly equipped with random movements at birth than with anything else, for he moves fingers, hands, arms, trunk, legs, feet, toes, head, mouth, and eyes in a large variety of ways and in no settled order. Digestion, excretion, heart-beat, and other visceral activities are in operation, and respiration is established with the birth cry. Muscular tonus, due to the continuous excitation of sensory nerves imbedded in the muscles, apparently exists in good order, and the infant can go to sleep and wake up, sneeze, take the mother's breast, perform the rather complicated movements of suckling, and a variety of other similar acts. All these responses, together with all others to be named in the paragraph that follows, as well as many less

important activities it has not been thought worth while to catalogue, are reflexes, and in number would probably mount up into the hundreds of thousands.

On the side of sensory equipment the baby's repertoire is much narrower, for he is probably entirely deaf, so that sounds are capable of producing only shock reactions; the range and scope of his vision is extremely abbreviated, and he possesses little or no power to fixate objects; he responds to touch stimulations, though he has no power to locate his touch sensations; there is little or no integration established between the various senses; he can feel pain and malaise, and seems capable of a vague vegetative state of comfort. With respect to knowledge his equipment is almost certainly nil.

His emotional life is also extremely circumscribed, for Watson has shown that it apparently contains but three elements, fear, rage, and "love," which may be described as follows: 5

Fear-caused by sudden movement of the infant or by removal of support, and by loud sounds; the response is catching of the breath, random clutching of the hands, closing of the eyes, and crying.

Rage-caused by hampering of movements; the response is stiffening of the body, slashing about of arms and legs, and holding of breath.

"Love"-caused by tickling, stroking, gentle rocking; the response is gurgling, cooing, and a general air of contentment.

Responses to pain are also native, and might well be added to this list, although psychologists are not in the habit of calling such responses emotional.

The first organ for the exploration of the environment is the mouth, into which all objects are very early conveyed. At this stage the eye and the hand function independently and only imperfectly, for until about the hundredth day the thumb usually remains folded in the palm and does not take part in the movements of the fingers, while the sphere of the infant's vision at the beginning is both narrow and shallow. A bright object must be placed within ten or twenty degrees of the line of vision of the eye, and at the right distance, or the child will continue to stare vacantly out into space. Koffka asserts that it can fixate a bright object only after the second week; and that about a week later it is able to turn its eyes either to fixate a stationary bright object or to follow a slowly moving one. In the course of the first three months, the various head and eye movements become fairly well established, and during the next three the activ

ities of the hand become prominent, until finally the coordination between hand and eye movements is achieved at about 120-150 days.

This achievement marks the beginning of an effective control over space. Objects seen at a distance may now be had for the reaching, or they may be requisitioned by pointing. Before then, out of sight was out of mind, and anything out of touch lay beyond the possibility of use, but with the establishment of the eye-hand coordination we note a great extension and unification of the field of action, to which is no doubt joined an equal expansion and integration of the developing personality.

Learning to walk.

Another advance in the establishment of space control is made when the infant begins to walk, somewhere near the end of the first year. This probably in part depends upon the maturation of the tissues involved, and in part upon the formation of habits, for infants are usually encouraged by their parents to attempt walking some time before they are able to do it. Learning to walk is of course but one of the many ways in which the infant begins to gain control over his skeletal muscles.

Learning to talk.

As Stern points out," three distinct processes working together lead to the development of speech in the child. There is, first, the child's meaningless babbling, for almost from the start it finds pleasure in the aimless utterance of miscellaneous sounds. This gives the laryngeal apparatus exercise, and paves the way for later efforts to enunciate specific sounds. Secondly, even before the end of the first year the child is able to understand a few requests, and it must therefore be considered to possess a certain number of meanings even before it can speak. Finally, there is the unintelligent imitation of sounds made before it by other people. The child has started on the long road of speech when these three activities begin to fuse, as usually happens somewhere around the end of the first year. The process is extremely involved, for no language uses more than a very few of the almost infinite number of sounds that the human being can produce, and neither his parents nor the infant ever know precisely how these particular sounds are made.

The child's first utterances are "one-word sentences," more akin to cries than to developed speech, and a wish or feeling character predominates. They are really commands or exclama

tions-"Mama" means some such thing as "Come here!" or "Something hurts!" There is of course not the slightest notion of grammar or of the categories of logic, and speech remains for some time totally uninflected.

Towards the middle or end of the second year, the child "makes the most important discovery of his life"”—the discovery that everything has a name. He often bothers his parents nearly to distraction by forever asking, "What is that?" Speech now begins to be determined more and more by things, and less by wish or feeling states, though language never becomes completely and entirely divorced from emotion, except possibly in the upper reaches of mathematical logic. Of course things have probably been functioning as such in the child's experience before this, but a great milestone is passed when words begin to get dissociated from wish-complexes, and tied up with thing-complexes, even if the process is never carried more than a little way by most of us. It marks the initiation of some degree of objectivity into our lives.

The child's first 'noes' always have the subjective significance of refusal, meaning, 'No, I won't have that,' whilst its significance as a statement, a negation of the objective, ‘No, that is not so' type, is not yet existent. An eighteen-months-old child can certainly scream 'No! No!' very energetically when a toy is taken from him: but if his hand is touched and he is asked 'Is this your little eye?' he cannot say 'No,' although when asked he can quite correctly show his hand and eyes. In the case of our own children the first no as a statement appeared two or three months after the early use of the word with its. affective and will tone.

The intervening time between the first and second significance of 'I' is often longer. The words I, me, mine, as expressions of strong self-will, were heard from our two eldest children as early as the age of two-'I look for ball,' or 'Me too' when others received anything;-but its use in mere statements did not follow until after two years and six months-as 'I am small.' 8

In general it can be said that mental defectives show a closer correspondence in their speech to the earlier stages of development than do normal individuals. "The feeble minded person is primarily conscious of his body, the outer world being but a confused background against which organic processes vividly appear."

Language acts both to extend and to limit our mental operations. It extends them, on the one hand by presenting the learner with a complex set of categories by means of which he may organize his experiences, and on the other by making available through the various channels of communication an immense array of data of all degrees of validity and worth. It limits them by

making it difficult for the learner to order his experiences in any other manner than that provided for him by his language, or to appreciate data that are not easily expressed in its terms. When things have received names, they are the more easily held before the mind. When they are not named, they offer no mental handle by which they may be grasped and manipulated. So important, indeed, is language in our social life that a special chapter in Part III of this book is given over to a discussion of the subject.

Learning to count.10

Long before objects are counted they are formed into natural groups, for the absence of one of a small number of items will be noticed even when the objects cannot be distinguished. After a time when each object in turn may be named with a numeral -as "One; one; one"-the serial arrangement of objects is achieved at about the beginning of the second year-"One; one more; one more." From this point the distance is not great to "One; two; three"-but at first the numerals are employed almost as concrete position names in the succession, and only later does the last number stand for the whole series; that is to say, the use of cardinal numbers follows the use of ordinals.

For a long time after a child is actually able to use numbers he may still be unacquainted with their abstract character. Thus a little boy aged four years three months when asked by his grandfather, "How many fingers have I got?" replied, "I don't know, I can only count my own fingers." Many adults have equally inadequate notions of the abstractness of other branches of mathematics, and may believe (for example) that geometry deals with the properties of actually existing figures.

Among many peoples counting and other arithmetical processes are much less important than they are in our culture, where they are required by the nature of our economic life, as well as by the demands of our science, and these peoples very frequently have extremely abbreviated number systems. Some do not count beyond three or four, but it must not be thought that they are therefore incapable of distinguishing between larger aggregates. They will know, for example, that one of their sheep is missing, not by making a count of the herd, but rather in the same way that the father of a family will miss a face at the dinner table. This implies no deficiency in natural intellectual power, but merely the absence of a certain piece of social apparatus.