Title: The Meaning of Infancy
Author: Fiske, John, 1842-1901
Language: English
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Riverside Educational Monographs

EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON



THE MEANING OF INFANCY

BY

JOHN FISKE



1883



CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY
     From "Excursions of an Evolutionist"

II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
     From "A Century of Science"

OUTLINE



INTRODUCTION

The new significance of education

The last century has witnessed an unprecedented development in the
significance of education.  One direct consequence has been an
increased reverence for childhood.  In this movement which has
increased the dignity of children and schools, two large forces
have been at work,--one social and the other scientific.  The
growth of the democratic spirit among men and institutions has made
the education of children a public necessity, and lifted the school
to a position of high social importance.  The application of the
theory of evolution to man and his life has revealed human infancy
as one of the largest factors making for the superiority of man in
the struggle for existence, and given to childhood a vast
biological importance.  The necessities of democracy and the truths
of science, acting more or less independently of each other, have
given to education a breadth of meaning which it did not possess
before.  They have shown that infancy is the largest opportunity
and education the most powerful instrument for the conscious
adjustment of man to the physical and social world in which he
lives.



_Democracy changes the function of schools_

It was the attempt of democracy to educate all of its children
which was the initial and important event that provoked large
changes in our notions of the social function of education.  As
long as the school was for the few, and such it was in the less
liberal periods of history, the school tended to be an
authoritative institution with more or less rigid methods of
procedure.  With fixed ideas of truth and the means of acquiring
truth, it was to a considerable degree unbending in its attitude
toward youth.  Even if freedom from economic toil and social
regulation permitted, only the type of mind that could fit the
school's established institutional ways could endure its discipline
and achieve its rewards.  Other types of mentality it would not
receive or retain as students.  Under such an organization the
school was selective of a special kind of talent.  It was not an
instrument, so adjustable in its methods of appeal and instruction,
that every manner of child could gain considerable of the wisdom of
the world.  But when a more democratic order was established, the
function of the school underwent a considerable change.  Democracy
granted to all men freedom in manhood; to safeguard its privileges,
it had to educate all men in childhood.  The school for selected
scholars had to be transformed into a school for every variety of
citizen.  With every child sent to school by order of the state,
the teacher had to forego his traditional aloofness, and to adjust
his methods of teaching so that every member of the enlarged school
community could come into a knowledge of the civilization in which
he lived.  With the inclusion of the blind, the deaf, the slow of
mind, and the restless of spirit,--individuals left out of the old
scheme of education and now reverently educated by the new
democratic order in spite of all their defects,--the school becomes
more flexible and variable in its methods of transmitting truth.
More of the knowledge of human life is brought within the
comprehension of children; more men are brought into a large and
sympathetic participation in the activities of our civilization.
In the truest sense the school becomes an instrument of adjustment
between childhood and society.



_Evolutionary thought interprets childhood_

If the democratic movement emphasized the factor of social
adjustment in the school's function, it was the scientific movement
of the last half-century which drew attention to infancy as a
superior opportunity for biological adjustment Among all the
contributions of modern evolutionary science to educational
thought, none is, more striking or more far-reaching in its
implications than that special group of generalizations which
states the biological function of a prolonged infancy in man.
Interpreting this period, of helplessness and dependence as one of
plasticity and opportunity, it has shown that the greater power of
man in adjusting himself to the complex conditions of life is due
to his educability, which in turn is the outcome of his lengthened
childhood.  This "doctrine of the meaning of infancy," for such it
has been called, is perhaps best known to the teaching profession
through those enlargements and applications of the doctrine which
have been made by Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler in his exposition of
"the meaning of education."  As a belief, it is at least as old as
the period of the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander.  As a
doctrine in our modern thought, it owes its influential
reappearance to certain evolutionary hypotheses of Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, which in turn stimulated Mr. John Fiske to that
further inquiry which resulted in those first cogent and extended
statements of the doctrine which have been the basis of so many
subsequent educational applications.



_Mr. Fiske's presentation of the meaning of infancy_

Because of the fundamental importance of Mr. Fiske's presentation
of "the doctrine of the meaning of infancy," his views are here
reprinted in detail.  The material consists of an essay and an
address.  The first of these, "The Meaning of Infancy," is a brief
and simplified restatement of those theories of man's origin and
destiny as first suggested in his lectures at Harvard University in
1871, and later developed more fully in the "Outlines of Cosmic
Philosophy," part II, chapters xvi, xxi, and xxii.  The second of
these, "The Part played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man," is an
address delivered by Mr. Fiske as the guest of honor at a dinner at
the Aldine Club, New York, May 13, 1895.  Together these two papers
constitute the most detailed and valuable elucidation of the
doctrine that we possess.  In offering them to the teaching
profession and the reading public in this form, it is with the
sincere hope that this biological interpretation of childhood and
education will lend a new spiritual dignity to the whole
institution of education.  It must certainly be gratifying to those
who are profound believers in the efficacy of education, to note
that its significance is wider than its service to particular
persons and states; that education is, in truth, the conscious and
latest mode of that wider world-evolution which has been in
progress since the beginning of time.



I

THE MEANING OF INFANCY

What is the Meaning of Infancy?  What is the meaning of the fact
that man is born into the world more helpless than any other
creature, and needs for a much longer season than any other living
thing the tender care and wise counsel of his elders?  It is one of
the most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits a
capacity for progress.  That man is widely different from other
animals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessness
of his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact.  Now between these
two commonplace facts is there any connection?  Is it a mere
accident that the creature which is distinguished as progressive
should also be distinguished as coming slowly to maturity, or is
there a reason lying deep down in the nature of things why this
should be so?  I think it can be shown, with very few words, that
between these two facts there is a connection that is deeply
in-wrought with the processes by which life has been evolved upon
the earth.  It can be shown that man's progressiveness and the
length of his infancy are but two sides of one and the same fact;
and in showing this, still more will appear.  It will appear that
it was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago gradually
converted our forefathers from brute creatures into human
creatures.  It is babyhood that has made man what he is.  The
simple unaided operation of natural selection could never have
resulted in the origination of the human race.  Natural selection
might have gone on forever improving the breed of the highest
animal in many ways, but it could never _unaided_ have started the
process of civilization or have given to man those peculiar
attributes in virtue of which it has been well said that the
difference between him and the highest of apes immeasurably
transcends in value the difference between an ape and a blade of
grass.  In order to bring about that wonderful event, the Creation
of Man, natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies,
and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthening of
babyhood.

Such is the point which I wish to illustrate in few words, and to
indicate some of its bearings on the history of human progress.
Let us first observe what it was then lengthened the infancy of the
highest animal, for then we shall be the better able to understand
the character of the prodigious effects which this infancy has
wrought.  A few familiar facts concerning the method in which men
learn how to do things will help us here.

When we begin to learn to play the piano, we have to devote much
time and thought to the adjustment and movement of our fingers and
to the interpretation of the vast and complicated multitude of
symbols which make up the printed page of music that stands before
us.  For a long time, therefore, our attempts are feeble and
stammering and they require the full concentrated power of the
mind.  Yet a trained pianist will play a new piece of music at
sight, and perhaps have so much attention to spare that he can talk
with you at the same time.  What an enormous number of mental
acquisitions have in this case become almost instinctive or
automatic!  It is just so in learning a foreign language, and it
was just the same when in childhood we learned to walk, to talk,
and to write.  It is just the same, too, in learning to think about
abstruse subjects.  What at first strains the attention to the
utmost, and often wearies us, comes at last to be done without
effort and almost unconsciously.  Great minds thus travel over vast
fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves
unaware.  Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the
"Mecanique Celeste," he had come upon formulas which Laplace
introduced with the word "obviously," where it took nevertheless
many days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps through
which that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap of
inference.  At some time in his youth no doubt Laplace had to think
of these things, just as Rubinstein had once to think how his
fingers should be placed on the keys of the piano; but what was
once the object of conscious attention comes at last to be
well-nigh automatic, while the night of the conscious mind goes on
ever to higher and vaster themes.

Let us now take a long leap from the highest level of human
intelligence to the mental life of a turtle or a codfish.  In what
does the mental life of such creatures consist?  It consists of a
few simple acts mostly concerned with the securing of food and the
avoiding of danger, and these few simple acts are repeated with
unvarying monotony during the whole lifetime of these creatures.
Consequently these acts are performed with great ease and are
attended with very little consciousness, and moreover the capacity
to perform them is transmitted from parent to offspring as
completely as the capacity of the stomach to digest food is
transmitted.  In all animals the new-born stomach needs but the
contact with food in order to begin digesting, and the new-born
lungs need but the contact with air in order to begin to breathe.
The capacity for performing these perpetually repeated visceral
actions is transmitted in perfection.  All the requisite nervous
connections are fully established during the brief embryonic
existence of each creature.  In the case of lower animals it is
almost as much so with the few simple actions which make up the
creature's mental life.  The bird known as the fly-catcher no
sooner breaks the egg than it will snap at and catch a fly.  This
action is not so very simple, but because it is something the bird
is always doing, being indeed one out of the very few things that
this bird ever does, the nervous connections needful for doing it
are all established before birth, and nothing but the presence of
the fly is required to set the operation going.

With such creatures as the codfish, the turtle, or the fly-catcher,
there is accordingly nothing that can properly be called infancy.
With them the sphere of education is extremely limited.  They get
their education before they are born.  In other words, heredity
does everything for them, education nothing.  The career of the
individual is predetermined by the careers of his ancestors, and he
can do almost nothing to vary it.  The life of such creatures is
conservatism cut and dried, and there is nothing progressive about
them.

In what I just said I left an "almost."  There is a great deal of
saving virtue in that little adverb.  Doubtless even animals low in
the scale possess some faint traces of educability; but they are so
very slight that it takes geologic ages to produce an appreciable
result.  In all the innumerable wanderings, fights, upturnings and
cataclysms of the earth's stupendous career, each creature has been
summoned under penalty of death to use what little wit he may have
had, and the slightest trace of mental flexibility is of such
priceless value in the struggle for existence that natural
selection must always have seized upon it, and sedulously hoarded
and transmitted it for coming generations to strengthen and
increase.  With the lapse of geologic time the upper grades of
animal intelligence have doubtless been raised higher and higher
through natural selection.  The warm-blooded mammals and birds of
to-day no doubt surpass the cold-blooded dinosaurs of the Jurassic
age in mental qualities as they surpass them in physical structure.
From the codfish and turtle of ancient family to the modern lion,
dog, and monkey, it is a very long step upward.  The mental life of
a warm-blooded animal is a very different affair from that of
reptiles and fishes.  A squirrel or a bear does a good many things
in the course of his life.  He meets various vicissitudes in
various ways; he has adventures.  The actions he performs are so
complex and so numerous that they are severally performed with less
frequency than the few actions performed by the codfish.  The
requisite nervous connections are accordingly not fully established
before birth.  There is not time enough.  The nervous connections
needed for the visceral movements and for the few simple
instinctive actions get organized, and then the creature is born
before he has learned how to do all the things his parents could
do.  A good many of his nervous connections are not yet formed,
they are only formable.  Accordingly he is not quite able to take
care of himself; he must for a time be watched and nursed.  All
mammals and most birds have thus a period of babyhood that is not
very long, but is on the whole longest with the most intelligent
creatures.  It is especially long with the higher monkeys, and
among the man-like apes it becomes so long as to be strikingly
suggestive.  An infant orang-outang, captured by Mr. Wallace, was
still a helpless baby at the age of three months, unable to feed
itself, to walk without aid, or to grasp objects with precision.

But this period of helplessness has to be viewed under another
aspect.  It is a period of plasticity.  The creature's career is no
longer exclusively determined by heredity.  There is a period after
birth when its character can be slightly modified by what happens
to it after birth, that is, by its experience as an individual.  It
becomes educable.  It is no longer necessary for each generation to
be exactly like that which has preceded.  A door is opened through
which the capacity for progress can enter.  Horses and dogs, bears
and elephants, parrots and monkeys, are all teachable to some
extent, and we have even heard of a learned pig.  Of learned asses
there has been no lack in the world.

But this educability of the higher mammals and birds is after all
quite limited.  By the beginnings of infancy the door for
progressiveness was set ajar, but it was not all at once thrown
wide open.  Conservatism stilt continued in fashion.  One
generation of cattle is much like another.  It would be easy for
foxes to learn to climb frees, and many a fox might have saved his
life by doing so; yet quickwitted as he is, this obvious device
never seems to have occurred to Reynard.  Among slightly teachable
mammals, however, there is one group more teachable than the rest.
Monkeys, with their greater power of handling things, have also
more inquisitiveness and more capacity for sustained attention than
any other mammals; and the higher apes are fertile in varied
resources.  The orang-outang and gorilla are for this reason
dreaded by other animals, and roam the undisputed lords of their
native forests.  They have probably approached the critical point
where variations in intelligence, always important, have come to be
supremely important, so as to be seized by natural selection in
preference to variations in physical constitution.  At some remote
epoch of the past--we cannot say just when or how--our half-human
forefathers reached and passed this critical point, and forthwith
their varied struggles began age after age to result in the
preservation of bigger and better brains, while the rest of their
bodies changed but little.  This particular work of natural
selection must have gone on for an enormous length of time, and as
its result we see that while man remains anatomically much like an
ape, be has acquired a vastly greater brain with all that this
implies.  Zoologically the distance is small between man and the
chimpanzee; psychologically it has become so great as to be
immeasurable.

But this steady increase of intelligence, as our forefathers began
to become human, carried with it a steady prolongation of infancy.
As mental life became more complex and various, as the things to be
learned kept ever multiplying, less and less could be done before
birth, more and more must be left to be done in the earlier years
of life.  So instead of being born with a few simple capacities
thoroughly organized, man came at last to be born with the germs of
many complex capacities which were reserved to be unfolded and
enhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personal
experience in each individual.  In this simple yet wonderful way
there has been provided for man a long period during which his mind
is plastic and malleable, and the length of this period has
increased with civilization until it now covers nearly one third of
our lives.  It is not that our inherited tendencies and aptitudes
are not still the main thing.  It is only that we have at last
acquired great power to modify them by training, so that progress
may go on with ever-increasing sureness and rapidity.

In thus pointing out the causes of infancy, we have at the same
time witnessed some of its effects.  One effect, of stupendous
importance, remains to be pointed out.  As helpless babyhood came
more and more to depend on parental care, the correlated feelings
were developed on the part of parents, and the fleeting sexual
relations established among mammals in general were gradually
exchanged for permanent relations.  A cow feels strong maternal
affection for her nursing calf, but after the calf is fully grown,
though doubtless she distinguishes it from other members of the
herd, it is not clear that she entertains for it any parental
feeling.  But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficult
to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended
gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the
mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the
permanent organization of the family.  When this step was
accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved.
For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the
clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue
out of which the most complex human society has come to be
constructed.  And out of that subordination of individual desires
to the common interest, which first received a definite direction
when the family was formed, there grew the rude beginnings of human
morality.

It was thus through the lengthening of his infancy that the highest
of animals came to be Man,--a creature with definite social
relationships and with an element of plasticity in his organization
such as has come at last to make his difference from all other
animals a difference in kind.  Here at last there had come upon the
scene a creature endowed with the capacity for progress, and a new
chapter was thus opened in the history of creation.  But it was not
to be expected that man should all at once learn how to take
advantage of this capacity.  Nature, which is said to make no
jumps, surely did not jump here.  The whole history of
civilization, indeed, is largely the history of man's awkward and
stumbling efforts to avail himself of this flexibility of mental
constitution with which God has endowed him.  For many a weary age
the progress men achieved was feeble and halting.  Though it had
ceased to be physically necessary for each generation to tread
exactly in the steps of its predecessor, yet the circumstances of
primitive society long made it very difficult for any deviation to
be effected.  For the tribes of primitive men were perpetually at
war with each other, and their methods of tribal discipline were
military methods.  To allow much freedom of thought would be
perilous, and the whole tribe was supposed to be responsible for
the words and deeds of each of its members.  The tribes most
rigorous in this stern discipline were those which killed out
tribes more loosely organized, and thus survived to hand down to
coming generations their ideas and their methods.  From this state
of things an intense social conservatism was begotten,--a strong
disposition on the part of society to destroy the flexible-minded
individual who dares to think and behave differently from his
fellows.  During the past three thousand years much has been done
to weaken this conservatism by putting an end to the state of
things which produced it.  As great and strong societies have
arisen, as the sphere of warfare has diminished while the sphere of
industry has enlarged, the need for absolute conformity has ceased
to be felt, while the advantages of freedom and variety come to be
ever more clearly apparent.  At a late stage of civilization, the
flexible or plastic society acquires even a military advantage over
the society that is more rigid, as in the struggle between French
and English civilization for primacy in the world.  In our own
country, the political birth of which dates from the triumph of
England in that mighty struggle, the element of plasticity in man's
nature is more thoroughly heeded, more fully taken account of, than
in any other community known to history; and herein lies the chief
potency of our promise for the future.  We have come to the point
where we are beginning to see that we may safely depart from
unreasoning routine, and, with perfect freedom of thinking in
science and in religion, with new methods of education that shall
train our children to think for themselves while they interrogate
Nature with a courage and an insight that shall grow ever bolder
and keener, we may ere long be able fully to avail ourselves of the
fact that we come into the world as little children with
undeveloped powers wherein lie latent all the boundless
possibilities of a higher and grander Humanity than has yet been
seen upon the earth.



II

THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference to
the reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back to
the days when I first became acquainted with the fact that there
were such things afloat in the world as speculations about the
origin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step by
step various stages in which that old question has come to have a
different look from what it had thirty years ago.  One of the
commonest objections we used to hear, from the mouths of persons
who could not very well give voice to any other objection, was that
anybody, whether he knows much or little about evolution, must have
the feeling that there is something degrading about being allied
with lower forms of life.  That was, I suppose, owing to the
survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation
ought to have been produced in some exceptional way.  That which
was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary
processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its
value.  It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took
pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of
thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something
supernatural; that state of culture in which there was an
altogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur that
there might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselessly
by little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water that
wears away the stone.  The general progress of familiarity with the
conception of evolution has done a great deal to change that state
of mind.  Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science
have at length caught something of its lesson,--that the infinitely
cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is
capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling
importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic
and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are
outgrowing with wider experience.

The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance of
modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day,
have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiar
and the application of those processes, showing how they produce
great results.

When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave
us that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from
allied forms through the operation of natural selection, it must
have been like a mental illumination to every person who
comprehended it.  But after all it left a great many questions
unexplained, as was natural.  It accounted for the phenomena of
organic development in general with wonderful success, but it must
have left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has been
produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selection
has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway
essentially different from lower races?  Is not man really
dethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which we
have been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in
the course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earth
as far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons
of Jurassic antiquity?

Such questions used to be asked, and when they were asked, although
one might have a very strong feeling that it was not so, at the
same time one could not exactly say why.  One could not then find
any scientific argument for objections to that point of view.  But
with the further development of the question the whole subject
began gradually to wear a different appearance; and I am going to
give you a little bit of autobiography, because I think it may be
of some interest in this connection.  I am going to mention two or
three of the successive stages which the whole question took in my
own mind as one thing came up after another, and how from time to
time it began to dawn upon me that I had up to that point been
looking at the problem from not exactly the right point of view.

When Darwin's "Descent of Man" was published in 1871, it was of
course a book characterized by all his immense learning, his
wonderful fairness of spirit and fertility of suggestion.  Still,
one could not but feel that it did not solve the question of the
origin of man.  There was one great contrast between that book and
his "Origin of Species."  In the earlier treatise he undertook to
point out a _vera causa_ of the origin of species, and he did it.
In his "Descent of Man" he brought together a great many minor
generalizations which facilitated the understanding of man's
origin.  But he did not come at all near to solving the central
problem, nor did he anywhere show clearly why natural selection
might not have gone on forever producing one set of beings after
another distinguishable chiefly by physical differences.  But
Darwin's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, at an early stage in
his researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnant
suggestion.  In that one respect Wallace went further than ever
Darwin did.  It was a point of which, indeed, Darwin admitted the
importance.  It was a point of which nobody could fail to
understand the importance, that in the course of the evolution of a
very highly organized animal, if there came a point at which it was
of more advantage to that animal to have variations in his
intelligence seized upon and improved by natural selection than to
have physical changes seized upon, then natural selection would
begin working almost exclusively upon that creature's intelligence,
and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent, while his
physical organism would change but slightly.  Now, that of course
applied to the case of man, who is changed physically but very
slightly from the apes, while he has traversed intellectually such
a stupendous chasm.

As soon as this statement was made by Wallace, it seemed to me to
open up an entirely new world of speculation.  There was this
enormous antiquity of man, during the greater part of which he did
not know enough to make history.  We see man existing here on the
earth, no one can say how long, but surely many hundreds of
thousands of years, yet only during just the last little fringe of
four or five thousand years has he arrived at the point where he
makes history.  Before that, something was going on, a great many
things were going on, while his ancestors were slowly growing up to
that point of intelligence where it began to make itself felt in
the recording of events.  This agrees with Wallace's suggestion of
a long period of psychical change, accompanied by slight physical
change.

Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin's "Descent of Man" came
out, just about the same time I happened to be reading Wallace's
account of his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, and how at one
time he caught a female orang-outang with a new-born baby, and the
mother died, and Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang by hand;
and this baby orang-outang had a kind of infancy which was a great
deal longer than that of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothing
compared to human infancy in length.  This little orang-outang
could not get up and march around, as mammals of less intelligence
do, when he was first born, or within three or four days; but after
three or four weeks or so he would get up, and begin taking hold of
something and pushing it around, just as children push a chair; and
he went through a period of staring at his hands, as human babies
do, and altogether was a good deal slower in getting to the point
where he could take care of himself.  And while I was reading of
that I thought, Dear me! if there is any one thing in which the
human race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is in
the enormous duration of their infancy; but it is a point that I do
not recollect ever seeing any naturalist so much as allude to.

It happened at just that time that I was making researches in
psychology about the organization of experiences, the way in which
conscious intelligent action can pass down into quasi-automatic
action, the generation of instincts, and various allied questions;
and I thought, Can it be that the increase of intelligence in an
animal, if carried beyond a certain point, must necessarily result
in prolongation of the period of infancy,--must necessarily result
in the birth of the mammal at a less developed stage, leaving
something to be done, leaving a good deal to be done, after birth?
And then the argument seemed to come along very naturally, that for
every action of life, every adjustment which a creature makes in
life, whether a muscular adjustment or an intelligent adjustment,
there has got to be some registration effected in the nervous
system, some line of transit worn for nervous force to follow;
there has got to be a connection between certain nerve-centres
before the thing can be done, whether it is the acts of the viscera
or the acts of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and of course
it is obvious that if the creature has not many things to register
in his nervous system, if he has a life which is very simple,
consisting of few actions that are performed with great frequency,
that animal becomes almost automatic in his whole life; and all the
nervous connections that need to be made to enable him to carry on
life get made during the foetal period or during the egg period,
and when he comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work.  As
one result of this, he does not learn from individual experience,
but one generation is like the preceding generations, with here and
there some slight modifications.  But when you get the creature
that has arrived at the point where his experience has become
varied, he has got to do a good many things, and there is more or
less individuality about them; and many of them are not performed
with the same minuteness and regularity, so that there does not
begin to be that automatism within the period during which he is
being developed and his form is taking on its outlines.  During
prenatal life there is not time enough for all these nervous
registrations, and so by degrees it comes about that he is born
with his nervous system perfectly capable only of making him
breathe and digest food,--of making him do the things absolutely
requisite for supporting life; instead of being born with a certain
number of definite developed capacities, he has a number of
potentialities which have got to be roused according to his own
individual experience.  Pursuing that line of thought, it began
after a while to seem clear to me that the infancy of the animal in
a very undeveloped condition, with the larger part of his faculties
in potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct result of
the increase of intelligence, and I began to see that now we have
two steps: first, natural selection goes on increasing the
intelligence; and secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough,
it makes a longer infancy, a creature is born less developed, and
therefore there comes this plastic period during which he is more
teachable.  The capacity for progress begins to come in, and you
begin to get at one of the great points in which man is
distinguished from the lower animals, for one of those points is
undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any one will say,
with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our period of
infancy we should not be progressive.  If we came into the world
with our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be very
much like another.

Then, looking round to see what are the other points which are most
important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes
that matter of the family.  The family has adumbrations and
foreshadowings among the lower animals, but in general it may be
said that while mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have
become established those peculiar relationships which constitute
what we know as the family; and it is easy to see how the existence
of helpless infants would bring about just that state of things.
The necessity of caring for the infants would prolong the period of
maternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and mother
and children together, but it would tend especially to keep the
mother and children together.  This business of the marital
relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in the
primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of
civilization.  Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent,
belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the early stages
the knitting together of permanent relations between mother and
infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part
of the male parent, came to bring about the family, and gradually
to knit those organizations which we know as clans.

Here we come to another stage, another step forward.  The instant
society becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let
these clans be broken up and die out,--the clan becomes the chief
object or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it you
retrograde again, you lose all you have gained; consequently, those
clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified that
the individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to the
needs of the clan,--those are the ones which would prevail in the
struggle for life.  In this way you gradually get an external
standard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get the
germs of altruism and morality; and in the prolonged affectionate
relation between the mother and the infant you get the opportunity
for that development of altruistic feeling which, once started in
those relations, comes into play in the more general relations, and
makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which keep society
together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.

So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a very
considerable result.  I had got these facts pretty clearly worked
out, and carried them around with me some years, before a, fresh
conclusion came over me one day with a feeling of surprise.  In the
old days before the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man
regarded himself as the centre of the universe.  He used to
entertain theological systems which conformed to his limited
knowledge of nature.  The universe seemed to be made for his uses,
the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his dwelling place, he
occupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to give him
light, etc.  When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect upon
theology was certainly tremendous.  I do not believe that justice
has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was
made to realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of
dirt in the universe, and that there were so many other worlds
greater than this.  It was one of the first great shocks involved
in the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do not
doubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimistic
philosophizing that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.

Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago--after thinking
about this manner in which man originated--that man occupies
certainly just as exceptional a position as before, if he is the
terminal in a long series of evolutionary events.  If at the end of
the long history of evolution comes man, if this whole secular
process has been going on to produce this supreme object, it does
not much matter what kind of a cosmical body he lives on.  He is
put back into the old position of theological importance, and in a
much more intelligent way than in the old days when he was supposed
to occupy the centre of the universe.  We are enabled to say that
while there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going on
throughout countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in the
one case where it is brought home to us we spell out an
intelligible story, and we do find things working along up to man
as a terminal fact in the whole process.  This is indeed a
consistent conclusion from Wallace's suggestion that natural
selection, in working toward the genesis of man, began to follow a
new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes.
Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in the history
of the universe.  It is no longer going to be necessary to shape
new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair,
when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take some
other animal's hide and make it into clothes.  You have got to a
new state of things.

After I had put together all these additional circumstances with
regard to the origination of human society and the development of
altruism, I began to see a little further into the matter.  It then
began to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a long
process of evolution, but in the origination of man there began the
development of the higher psychical attributes, and those
attributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in the
development of the human race.  Just take this mere matter of
"altruism," as we call it.  It is not a pretty word, but must serve
for want of a better.  In the development of altruism from the low
point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together,
up to the point reached at the present day, there has been a
notable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of
improvement.  The progress has been all in the direction of
bringing out what we call the higher spiritual attributes.  The
feeling was now more strongly impressed upon me than ever, that all
these things tended to set the whole doctrine of evolution into
harmony with religion; that if the past through which man had
originated was such as has been described, then religion was a fit
and worthy occupation for man, and some of the assumptions which
underlie every system of religion must be true.  For example, with
regard to the assumption that what we see of the present life is
not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the question
beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life
eternal.  When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to
say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common
sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to
produce a merely ephemeral result.  But since then another argument
has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was
beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were
coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start,
there came into the human mind--how one can hardly say, but there
did come--the beginnings of a groping after something that lies
outside and beyond the world of sense.  That groping after a
spiritual world has been going on here for much more than a hundred
thousand years, and it has played an enormous part in the history
of mankind, in the whole development of human society.  Nobody can
imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the present
time.  Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom
that does not exist, or a reaching out after something that does
exist, but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has only
been able to gain a crude idea.  And the latter seems a far more
probable conclusion, because, if it is not so, it constitutes a
unique exception to all the operations of evolution we know about.
As a general thing in the whole history of evolution, when you see
any internal adjustment reaching out toward something, it is in
order to adapt itself to something that really exists; and if the
religious cravings of man constitute an exception, they are the one
thing in the whole process of evolution that is exceptional and
different from all the rest.  And this is surely an argument of
stupendous and resistless weight.

I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in
the order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of
illustration.  The net result of the whole is to put evolution in
harmony with religious thought,--not necessarily in harmony with
particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the
great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear
to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear.  So I
think it will before a great while.  If you take the case of some
evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure that
materialism accounts for everything (he has got it all cut and
dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is really
no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question
whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led
him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he
started from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the French
materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter
would be the true explanation.  There are a good many people who
start on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questions
all settled to begin with.  It was the most natural thing in the
world that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs,
after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number of
church doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school of
men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific
researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove
by the methods of physical science, and we will throw everything
else overboard."  That was very much the state of mind of the
famous French atheists of the last century.  But only think how
chaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to our
minds to-day.  Just think how we have in the present century
arrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in nature
as collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with the
view which even the greatest of those scientific French
materialists could take.  Consider how fragmentary and how lacking
in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe
we can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be
an atheistic world.  That hostility between science and religion
continued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the
ancient doctrine of special creation.  But now that the religious
world has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see the
truth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendship
upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary
antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regarding
as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quicker
than we realize.

There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
although I can only hint at it.  Among the things that happened in
that dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase
of his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense
importance.  Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he
maintained that the human race would never have become human if it
had not been for the hand.  I do not know that there was so very
much exaggeration about that.  It was certainly of great
significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence
increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection
to work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developed
hands and could manipulate things.  It was a wonderful era in the
history of creation when that creature could take a club and use it
for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
more lever to the levers that made up his arm.  From that day to
this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated
upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him.
An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man
learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that
course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in
our dainty dinner this evening.  Here was another means of acting
upon the environment.  Here was the beginning of the working of
endless physical and chemical changes through the application of
heat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was the
beginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts.

Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past,
when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found
expression in the crudest form of myths, the aesthetic sense was
germinating likewise.  Away back in the glacial period you find
pictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler,
portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; you
see the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond question
that the aesthetic sense was there.  There has been an immense
aesthetic development since then.  And I believe that in the future
it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun to
realize.  I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of
his thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations.
This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind.
There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in the
mere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual training
school, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and
total depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, and
also in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimes
you must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in other
words, you must humour their habits and proclivities).  In all this
there is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alone
the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic work a man does, he is
doing that which in the very working has in it an element of
something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives not
very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which is
the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; he
is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer
relations to his fellow man.

In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past,
crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances.  The kind
of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained
intelligence behind it.  One of the great needs of our time is the
multiplication of skilled and special labour.  The demand for the
products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude
products of labour, and it will be more and more so.  For there
comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to
which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,--those things
which merely keep the animal alive.  But to those things which
minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man, there
is almost no limit.  The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
infinite.  One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
creature who is never satisfied.  It is well for him that he is so,
that there is always something more for which he craves.  To my
mind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more
than a mere animate machine.



 OUTLINE

 I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY

  1. The relation between progress and infancy
  2. Man's method of learning
  3. The mental inheritance of animals
  4. Infancy and educability of animals
  5. Infancy is a period of plasticity
  6. Educability varies widely in different creatures
  7. Increased intelligence means prolonged infancy
  8. The socializing effects of infancy
  9. The use of this capacity for progress in the past


 II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

  1. The grandeur of natural causation
  2. The problem of man's ascendancy
  3. Natural selection seizes on intelligence
  4. A long infancy characteristic of man
  5. A complex life requires a longer infancy
  6. Infancy fosters sociability and the family
  7. Group life increases the social and moral bonds
  8. Spiritual man is evolution's terminal factor
  9. Man marks a development along new lines
 10. Hand-work in the evolution of intelligence
 11. The educational value of aesthetic effort
 12. Man's spirituality is prophetic of his destiny





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Meaning of Infancy" ***

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