James Mark Baldwin - "The Story of the Mind"

Omar Al Raschid Bey - "Das hohe Ziel der Erkenntnis"

Arthur Train - "The Confessions of Artemas Quibble"

Richard Jefferies - "Round About a Great Estate"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Story of the Mind

J >> James Mark Baldwin >> The Story of the Mind




2. Under the same conditions, the tendency to use both hands together
was about double the tendency to use either (seen from the number of
cases of the use of both hands in the figures given above).

3. A distinct preference for the right hand in violent efforts in
reaching became noticeable in the seventh and eighth months.
Experiments during the eighth month on this cue gave, in 80 cases,
right hand, 74 cases; left hand, 5 cases; both hands, 1 case. This was
true in two very distinct classes of cases: first, reaching for
objects, neutral as regards colour (newspaper, etc.), at more than the
reaching distance; and, second, reaching for bright colours at any
distance. Under the stimulus of bright colours, from 86 cases, 84 were
right-hand cases and 2 left-hand. Right-handedness had accordingly
developed under pressure of muscular effort in the sixth and seventh
months, and showed itself also under the influence of a strong colour
stimulus to the eye.

4. Up to this time the child had not learned to stand or to creep;
hence the development of one hand more than the other is not due to
differences in weight between the two longitudinal halves of the body.
As she had not learned to speak or to utter articulate sounds with
much distinctness, we may say also that right or left-handedness may
develop while the speech centres are not yet functioning. Further, the
right hand is carried over after objects on the left side, showing
that habit in reaching does not determine its use.

_Theoretical_.--Some interesting points arise in connection with the
interpretation of these facts. If it be true that the order of rise of
mental and physiological functions is constant, then for this question
the results obtained in the case of one child, if accurate, would hold
for others apart from any absolute time determination. We should
expect, therefore, that these results would be confirmed by
experiments on other children, and this is the only way their
correctness can be tested.

If, when tested, they should be found correct, they would be
sufficient answer to several of the theories of right-handedness
heretofore urged, as has been already remarked. The rise of the
phenomenon must be sought, therefore, in more deep-going facts of
physiology than such theories supply. Furthermore, if we go lower in
the animal scale than man, analogies for the kinds of experience which
are urged as reasons for right-handedness are not present; animals do
not carry their young, nor pat them to sleep, nor do animals shake
hands!

A full discussion would lead us to the conclusion that dextrality is
due to a difference in development in the two hemispheres of the
brain, that these differences are hereditary, and that they show
themselves toward the end of the first year.

It is a singular circumstance that right-handedness and speech are
controlled by the same hemisphere of the brain and from contiguous
areas. It would explain this--and at the same time it seems probable
from other considerations--if we found that right-handedness was first
used for expression before speech; and that speech has arisen from
the setting aside, for further development, of the area in the brain
first used for right-handedness. Musical expression has its seat in or
near the same lobe of the brain.

_The Child's Mental Development in General_.--The actual development
of the child, as observations from many sources indicate it, may be
sketched very briefly in its main outlines. It is probable that the
earliest consciousness is simply a mass of touch and muscular
sensations experienced in part before birth. Shortly after birth the
child begins to connect his impressions with one another and to show
Memory. But both memory and Association are very weak, and depend upon
intense stimulations, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. The
things which most effect him at these early stages are those which
bring him into conditions of sharp physical pain or give him acute
pleasure. Yet it is a remarkable fact that at birth the pain reflex is
wanting. His whole life up to about the fourth month turns upon his
organic and vegetative needs. At three months the young child will
forget his mother or nurse after a very few days. Attention begins to
arise about the end of the first quarter year, appearing first in
response to bright lights and loud sounds, and being for a
considerable time purely reflex, drawn here and there by the
successive impressions which the environment makes. With lights and
sounds, however, movements also attract the infant's attention very
early; and the passage from reflex attention to a sort of vague
interest seems to arise first in connection with the movements of the
persons about him. This interest goes on to develop very rapidly in
the second half year, in connection more particularly with the
movements which are associated with the child's own comfort and
discomfort. The association of muscular sensations with those of touch
and sight serves to give him his first clear indications of the
positions of his own members and of other objects. His discrimination
of what belongs to his own body is probably aided by so-called "double
touch"--the fact that when he touches his own body, as in touching his
foot with the hand, he has two sensations, one in the foot and the
other in the hand. This is not the case when he touches other objects,
and he soon learns the distinction, getting the outlines of his own
body marked out in a vague way. The learning of the localities on his
body which he can not see, however, lags far behind. The movements of
his limbs in active exploration, accompanied by sight, enables him to
build up his knowledge of the world about him. Learning this he soon
falls to "experimenting" with the things of space. Thus he begins to
find out how things fit together, and what their uses are.

On the side of his movements we find him going through a series of
remarkable adaptations to his environment. At the beginning his
movements are largely random discharges, or reflexes of an instinctive
character, such as sucking. Yet in the first month he shows the
beginning of adaptation to the suggestions of his daily life, the
first manifestations of acquired Habit. He learns when and how long he
is expected to sleep, when and how much to eat; he very soon finds out
the peculiar touch and vocal tones of this person or that, and acts
upon these distinctions. He gets to know the meaning of his food
bottle, to understand the routine movements of persons about the
room, and the results of violations of their order. His hat, wraps,
carriage, become in the first half year signals to him of the outdoor
excursion. He no longer bobs his head about when held erect, and
begins to control his natural processes. The remarkable thing about
all these adaptations is that they occur before the infant can in any
sense be said to have a Will; for, as has been said, the fibres of the
brain necessary to voluntary action--in the cortex of the
hemispheres--are not yet formed.

The realization of this extraordinary adaptiveness of the very young
child should save parents many an anxious day and sleepless night.
There is practically nothing more easy than to impress upon the child
whatever habits of daily--and nightly!--routine one wishes to give
him, if he be taken early enough. The only requirements are knowledge
of what is good for him, and then _inviolable regularity_ in
everything that concerns him. Under this treatment he will become as
"obstinate" in being "good" as the opposite so-called indulgent or
capricious treatment always make him in being "bad." There is no
reason whatever that he should be walked with or held, that he should
be taken up when he cries, that he should be trotted when he awakes,
or that he should have a light by night. Things like this are simply
bad habits for which the parents have themselves to thank. The child
adapts himself to his treatment, and it is his treatment that his
habits reflect.

During the second half-year--sooner or later in particular cases--the
child is ready to begin to imitate. Imitation is henceforth, for the
following few years, the most characteristic thing about his action.
He first imitates movements, later sounds, especially vocal sounds.
His imitations themselves also show progress, being at first what is
called "simple imitation" (repeating a distinction already spoken of
in the chapter on animals), as when the child lies in bed in the
morning and repeats the same sound over and over again. He hears his
own voice and imitates it. In this sort of imitation he simply allows
his instinct to reproduce what he hears without control or
interference from him. He does not improve, but goes on making the
same sounds with the same mistakes again and again. But a little later
he begins what is called "persistent imitation"--the "try-try-again,"
already spoken of--which is a very different thing. Persistent
imitation shows unmistakably the presence of will. The child is not
satisfied with simple imitation or mere repetition, whether it be good
or bad in its results. He now sees his errors and aims consciously to
improve. Note the child's struggles to speak a word right by imitation
of the pronunciation of others. And he succeeds. He gradually gets his
muscles under control by persistence in his try-try-again.

Then he goes further--about the beginning of his second year, usually.
He gets the idea that imitation is the way to learn, and turns all his
effort into imitations experimentally carried out. He is now ready to
learn most of the great processes of his later culture. Speech,
writing, this special accomplishment and that, are all learned by
experimental imitation.

The example of the child's trying to draw or write has already been
cited. He looks at the copy before him; sets all his muscles of hand
and arm into massive contraction; turns and twists his tongue, bends
his body, winds his legs together, holds his breath, and in every way
concentrates his energies upon the copying of the model. In all this
he is experimenting.

He produces a wealth of movements, from which, very gradually, as he
tries and tries again, the proper ones are selected out. These he
practises, and lets the superfluous ones fall away, until he secures
the requisite control over hand and arm. Or suppose a child
endeavouring, in the crudest fashion, to put a rubber on the end of a
pencil, after seeing some one else do it--just the sort of thing a
year-old child loves to imitate. What a chaos of ineffective
movements! But with repeated effort he gets nearer and nearer to it,
and finally succeeds.

On the side of action, two general principles have been formulated in
child psychology, both illustrated in the cases and experiments now
given: The one, Motor Suggestion, is, as we saw, a principle of
general psychology. Its importance to the child is that by it he forms
Habits, useful responses to his environment, and so saves himself many
sad blunders. The other principle is that of Imitation; by it the
child learns new things directly in the teeth of his habits. By
exercising in an excessive way what he has already learned through his
experimental imitations, he is continually modifying his habits and
making new adaptations. These two principles dominate the active life
of the adult man as well.

_Personality Suggestion._--A further set of facts may be cited to
illustrate the working of Suggestion, now in the sphere of the
receptive life. They are important as showing the child's progress in
learning the great features of personality.

One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its
responses to its environment is the tendency to recognise differences
of personality. It responds to what have been called Suggestions of
Personality. As early as the second month it distinguishes its
mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic
methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts
itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to
these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be
of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery
depends upon the presence of certain kinds of "personality
suggestion." It is quite a different thing from the child's behavior
toward things which are not persons. Things come to be, with some few
exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite,
more and more unimportant; things may be subordinated to regular
treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important,
as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of
movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the
most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice
comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its
expressions equal the person in all his attributes.

I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies
and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of
personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows
stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons--an uncertainty
aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of
treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of
quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of
expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the
"projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal
consciousness.

It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully
conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more
closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on
account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little
detail.

1. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is
_movement_. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady
attention are directed to moving things--a swaying curtain, a moving
light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things
soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the
things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that
brings him his bottle, movement that regulates the stages of his bath,
movement that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and
rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the
feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption
from pain, is this--movements come to succour him. Change in his
bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the
rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are
accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he
sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earliest reflection
in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this
stage his "personality suggestion" is a _pain-movement-pleasure_
state of mind; to this he reacts with a smile, and a crow, and a kick.
Undoubtedly this association gets some of its value from the other
similar one in which the movements are the infant's own. It is by
movements that he gets rid of pains and secures pleasures.

Many facts tend to bear out this position. My child cried in the dark
when I handled her, although I imitated the nurse's movements as
closely as possible. She tolerated a strange presence so long as it
remained quietly in its place; but let it move, and especially let it
usurp any of the pieces of movement-business of the nurse or mother,
and her protests were emphatic. The movements tended to bring the
strange elements of a new face into the vital association,
pain-movement-pleasure, and so to disturb its familiar course; this
constituted it a strange "personality."

It is astonishing, also, what new accidental elements may become parts
of this association. Part of a movement, a gesture, a peculiar habit
of the nurse, may become sufficient to give assurance of the welcome
presence and the pleasures which the presence brings. Two notes of my
song in the night stood for my presence to H., and no song from any
one else could replace it. A lighted match stopped the crying of E.
for food in her fourteenth week, although it was but a signal for a
process of food preparation lasting several minutes; and a simple
light never stopped her crying under any other circumstances.

2. With this first start in the sense of personality we find also the
beginning of the recognition of different personalities. It is
evident that the sense of another's presence thus felt in the infant's
consciousness rests, as all associations rest, upon regularity or
repetition; his sense of expectancy is aroused whenever the chain of
events is started. This is soon embodied largely in two indications:
the face and the voice. But it is easy to see that this is a very
meagre sense of personality; a moving machine which brought pain and
alleviated suffering might serve as well. So the child begins to
learn, in addition, the fact that persons are in a measure individual
in their treatment of him; that their individuality has elements of
uncertainty or _irregularity_ about it. This growing sense is very
clear to one who watches an infant in its second half year. Sometimes
its mother gives it a biscuit, but sometimes she does not. Sometimes
the father smiles and tosses the child; sometimes he does not. Even
the indulgence of the grandmother has its times and seasons. The child
looks for signs of these varying moods and methods of treatment; for
his pains of disappointment arise directly on the basis of that former
sense of regular personal presence upon which his expectancy goes
forth.

This new element of the child's sense of persons becomes, at one
period of its development, quite the controlling element. His action
in the presence of the persons of the household becomes hesitating and
watchful. Especially does he watch the face, for any expressive
indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression
is now the most regular as well as the most delicate indication.
Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression
up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle sensibility to
these differences; and normal children all do. Animals are also very
expert at this.

All through the child's second year, and longer, his sense of the
persons around him is in this stage. The incessant "why?" with which
he greets any action affecting him, or any information given him, is
witness to the simple puzzle of the apparent capriciousness of
persons. Of course he can not understand "why"; so the simple fact to
him is that mamma will or won't, he knows not beforehand which. He is
unable to anticipate the treatment in detail, and he has not of course
learned any principles of interpretation of the conduct of father or
mother lying back of the details.

But in all this period there is germinating in his consciousness--and this
very uncertainty is an important element of it--the seed of a far-reaching
thought. His sense of persons--moving, pleasure-or-pain-giving, uncertain
but self-directing persons--is now to become a sense of agency, of power,
which is yet not the power of the regular-moving door on its hinges or the
rhythmic swinging of the pendulum of the clock. The sense of _personal
agency_ is now forming, and it again is potent for still further
development of the social consciousness. It is just here, I think, that
imitation becomes so important in the child's life. This is imitation's
opportunity. The infant watches to see how others act, because his own
weal and woe depends upon this "how"; and inasmuch as he knows not what to
anticipate, his mind is open to every suggestion of movement. So he falls
to imitating. His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of
adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for
himself.

It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to
grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes.
Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets
the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes
"contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard,
and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality.
For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be
capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.

3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the
persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in
spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of
personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence
and another, so now he learns the difference between one _character_
and another. Every character is more or less regular in its
irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament
and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and
thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He
is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud,
pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no
adult is present who has authority or will to punish him. This stage
in his "knowledge of man" leads to very marked differences of conduct
on his part.

4. He now goes on to acquire real _self-consciousness_ and _social
feeling_. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate
heading below.

It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about
Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which
the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four
roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called
the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare
distinction _of persons from things_ on the ground of peculiar
pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or
capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests
_personal agency_. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but
wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of
behaviour or _personal characters_ of different persons. 4. After his
sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, he gets
what is really _self-consciousness_ and _social feeling_.

[Footnote 2: It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we
find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is
curious to note that, besides the general gregariousness which many
animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the
presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem
to recognise dogs by _smell_. So with cats, which also respond
instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem
to be guided by _sight_. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of
fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.]

_Self-consciousness._--So far as we have now gone the child has only a
very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons
who move about him. The persons are "projective" to him, mere bodies
or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they
show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun,
as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes
about from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of
others.

Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others, he finds himself
gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same
actions with them, to discover what they are feeling, what their
motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees
his father handle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks
himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the
child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the
child's curiosity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes
up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that
his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the
impulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now
discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive
of the action.

This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which
many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the
development of the child; and because of this twofold significance it
is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the
opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social
philosophy.

1. By such imitation the child learns to associate his own sense of
physical power, together with his own private pleasures and pains,
with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in
other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become
his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be
characteristic of the persons of his social circle, become his, in
his own thought. He is now _for himself_ an agent who has the marks of
a Person or a Self. He now understands _from_ _the inside_ all the
various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer
"projective"--simply there, outside, in the environment; it has become
what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together
by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles.

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