The Mind of the Child Volume 1; The Senses and the Will (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 Excerpt: ... away, though it knows how to run well enough; but later it runs away invariably. Bird-dogs are likewise entirely without fear of man at the beginning of life, even after they can see. But, after they have once become acquainted with the whip, they manifest fear of man in the most marked manner--badger-dogs, in individual cases, in a striking degree, as Romanes reports, without their having ever been whipped, so far as appears. How inherited endowment is united here with individual experience we can not at present say, for lack of facts. But that fear of man is not originally present, but is introduced into many animals in common by inoculation through man's own agency, appears from the behavior of many animals, which in the wilderness unvisited by man are not in the least shy, whereas their fellows of the same species, where they are hunted, hide themselves with the greatest caution, or flee, even when they are not pursued, if they get scent of human beings. Of the graceful phalaropes, especially, I know this to be true, from personal observation. They have no fear at all of man in the uninhabited interior of Iceland, where I frequently observed them, whereas on the inhabited coast they are anything but tame. So, with man also, it is, on the one hand, ignorance of danger, on the other hand, the becoming accustomed to it, that makes him fearless. 7. Astonishment. It is exceedingly difficult to determine the moment when a human being is for the first time in his life astonished. Surprise, which manifests itself by a reflex movement of the arms, and that in the first week, after a sudden loud noise, is essentially different from astonishment. And the great concentration of attention that the infant bestows on his own fingers, after he has begun his attempts a...