II
Philosophers, always dominated by a sublime idea of human faculties, have too much neglected the study of savages and children. And yet it is here that we ought to begin, if it is true that one must proceed from the simple to the complex. Physiologists seem, more than others, to have recognised this necessity, in order to distinguish inherited psychic facts from those which we are capable of acquiring by the experience of the senses. Let the physiologist remain long days at home with a sympathetic wife and a darling child, attentively observing and writing the whole life of the latter; this is for him the best, the ideal study.
My colleague, Prof. Preyer, one of the most distinguished of embryologists, had this happy thought, and his book on the 'Soul of the Child’[29] is one of the most interesting volumes of modern psychology.
Even the first day after birth the face of the child changes suddenly if it is held towards the light from the window, or if its eyes are shaded by a hand.
On the second day it shuts its eyes forcibly and immediately when a lighted candle is brought near to it, and draws its head back energetically if a light is held before its eyes on waking.
In this case the child responds through excessive sensitiveness, not through fear. A child, a few months old, looking at the clouds or a snow-covered surface, closes its eyes oftener and more forcibly than an adult.
During the first month children do not wink at a sudden noise, or when one makes a pretence of putting a finger into their eye.
In Prof. Preyer’s child this movement appeared for the first time on the fifty-seventh day, and only from the sixtieth did it become regular and constant. We cannot think that a child, nine weeks old, can have any conception of danger, and that it closes its eyes and lifts its hands from fear. It was certainly not the result of experience, as we know that there had been no opportunity for it to learn the injurious nature of many things.
Instead of entertaining the notion of fear, it seems more logical to consider these facts as analogous to the shutting of the eyes during the first hours of life.
The sudden shadow or sound constitutes a disagreeable fact, and the disturbed nervous system responds by a reflex movement, just as many children cry when they hear the first clap of thunder, although they do not know what it is, and start when they suddenly hear a door bang or some object fall.
Preyer noticed that in the seventh week his child started and lifted its hands at any sudden noise without waking.
An expression of the greatest wonder can be produced in a child of seven months old by opening and shutting a fan before it; but the wide-open eye and mouth and the fixed look are not merely signs of astonishment, for when one draws the infant away from the breast, it expresses its lively desire to be fed again by the same attitude.
In these cases the eyes shine with a more abundant secretion of tears. Wide-open eyes accompany the first smile. One notices that children have a tendency to open their eyes in joy and close them in displeasure.
Children, like the insane and like animals, when they have had some disagreeable experience, are frightened at everything which they do not know. Sometimes fear appears suddenly; from one day to another a child may become timid and frightened when it sees an unknown person, or if the father or mother makes some unusual gesture, or calls loudly.
The fear which children have of dogs and cats, before they have learnt why they are to be feared, is a consequence of heredity; even later, when they have gained some experience, they are overcome with fear at the sight of sucking pups or kittens, which would be ridiculous if it were not an innate aversion. The same may be said of the fear of falling when they make the first steps, although they have never yet fallen, and of the fear which children have at the first sight of the sea.