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The
Origin of Infancy - By John Fiske
The simplest
actions in which the nervous system is concerned are what
we call reflex actions. All the visceral actions which keep us alive
from moment to moment, the movements of the heart and lungs, the
contractions of arteries, the secretions of glands, the digestive
operations of the stomach and liver, belong to the class of reflex
actions.
Throughout the animal world these acts are repeated, with
little or no variation, from birth until death, and the tendency to
perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before
birth. Every animal breathes and digests as well at the beginning of
his life as he ever does. Contact with air and food is all that is
needed, and there is nothing to be
learned. These actions,
though they are performed by the nervous system, we do not class as
psychical, because they are nearly or quite unattended by
consciousness.
The psychical life of the lowest animals consists of a
few simple acts directed toward the securing of food and the avoidance
of danger, and these acts we are in the habit of classing as
instinctive. They are so simple, so few, and so often repeated, that
the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous
system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he
begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple
repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is
everything, and his individual experience is next to nothing.
As we ascend the animal scale till we come to the higher birds and
mammals, we find a very interesting and remarkable change beginning.
The general increase of intelligence
involves an increasing
variety and complication of experiences. The acts which the animal
performs in the course of its life become far more numerous, far more
various, and far more complex. They are therefore severally repeated
with less frequency in the lifetime of each individual.
Consequently
the tendency to perform them is not completely organized in the
nervous system of the offspring before birth. The short period of
ante-natal existence does not afford time enough for the organization
of so many and such complex habitudes and capacities. The process
which in the lower animals is completed before birth is in the higher
animals left to be completed after birth. When the creature begins its
life it is not completely organized. Instead of the power of doing all
the things which its parents did, it starts with the power of doing
only some few of them; for the rest it has only latent capacities
which need to be brought out by its individual experience
after
birth. In other words, it begins its separate life not as a matured
creature, but as an infant which needs for a time to be watched and
helped.
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