The child's first movements are aimless, but soon the impressions it receives by striking hands and feet against soft and hard things bring about a dim knowledge of the boundaries of itself, and the kinesthetic impulses from joints and muscles help this knowledge. The outside world commences to separate itself from the "me," though both are vague and shadowy. Soon it learns that one part of the outside world is able to satisfy its hunger, to supply a need, and it commences to recognize the existence of benevolent outside agencies; and it also learns little by little that its instinctive cries bring these agencies to it. I do not mean that the baby has any internal language corresponding to the idea of outside agency, benevolence, etc., but it gets to know that its cries are potent, that a breast brings relief and satisfaction. At first it cries, the breast comes, there is relief and satisfaction, and it makes no connection or no connection is made between these events of outer and inner origin. But the connection is finally made,--desire becomes definitely articulate in the cry of the baby, which thus becomes a plea and a summons. Anticipation of good to come appears and with it the germ of hope and forward looking, and there is realization or disappointment, joy or anger or sorrow. Thus desire is linked up with satisfaction in a definite way, ideas and feelings of demand and supply begin to appear and perhaps power itself, in the vague notion, "I can get milk," commences to be felt. Social life starts when the child associates the mother with the milk, with the desire and the satisfaction. In the relationship established between mother and baby is the first great social contact; love, friendship, discipline, teaching and belief have their origin when, at the mother's breast, the child separates its mother from the rest of the things of the world.
And not only in the relief of hunger is the mother active, but she gets to be associated with the relief from wet and irritating clothes, the pleasant bath, and the pleasure of the change of position that babies cry for. Her bosom and her arms become sources of pleasure, and the race has immortalized them as symbolic of motherhood, in song, in story and in myth.
Not only does he associate the mother with the milk but her very presence brings him comfort, even when he is not hungry. It is within the first few months of life that the child shows that he is a gregarious[1] animal,--gregarious in the sense that he is unhappy away from others. To be alone is thus felt to be essentially an evil, to be with others is in itself a good. This gregarious feeling is the sine qua non of social life: when we punish any one we draw away from him; when we reward we get closer to him. All his life the child is to find pleasure in being with people and unhappiness when away from them, unless he be one of those in whom the gregarious instinct is lacking. For instincts may be absent, just as eye pigment is; there are mental albinos, lacking the color of ordinary human feeling. Or else some experience may make others hateful to him, or he may have so intellectualized his life that this instinct has atrophied. This gregarious feeling will heighten his emotions, he will gather strength from the feeling that "others are with him," he will join societies, clubs, organizations in response to the same feeling that makes sheep graze on a hillside in a group, that makes the monkeys in a cage squat together, rubbing sides and elbows. The home in which our child finds himself, though a social institution, is not gregarious; it gives him only a limited contact, and as soon as he is able and self-reliant he seeks out a little herd, and on the streets, in the schoolroom and playground, he really becomes a happy little herd animal.
[1] One of my children would stop crying if some one merely entered his room when he was three weeks old. He was, and is, an intensely gregarious boy.
Let us turn back to the desire for activity. As the power to direct the eyes develops, as hands become a little more sure, because certain pathways in brain and cord "myelinize,"[1] become functional, the outside world attracts in a definite manner and movements become organized by desires, by purpose. It's a red-letter day in the calendar of a human being when he first successfully "reaches" something; then and there is the birth of power and of successful effort. All our ideas of cause and effect originate when we cause changes in the world, when we move a thing from thither to yon. No philosopher, though he becomes so intellectualized that he cannot understand how one thing or event causes another, ever escapes from the feeling that HE causes effects. Purpose, resistance, success, failure, cause, effect, these become inextricably wound up with our thoughts and beliefs from the early days when, looking at a dangling string, we reached for it once, twice, a dozen times and brought it in triumph to our mouth. And our idea that there were forbidden things came when the watchful mother took it out of our mouth, saying, "No, no, baby mustn't!"
[1] At birth, though most of the great nervous pathways are laid down, they are non-functional largely because the fibers that compose them are unclothed, non-myelinated. The various kinds of tracts have different times for becoming "myelinated" as was the discovery of the great analogist, Flechsig.
