4. Temporal ideas develop along with the spacial ideas. The ability to form regular temporal ideas and the agreeableness of these to the child shows itself in the first months in the movements of his limbs and especially in the tendency to accompany rhythms that are heard, with similar rhythmical movements. Some children can imitate correctly, even before, they can speak, the rhythmical melodies that they hear, in sounds and intonations. Still, the ideas of longer intervals are very imperfect even at the end of the first year and later, so that a child gives very irregular judgements as to the duration of different periods and also as to their sequence.
5. The development of associations and of ****** apperceptive combinations goes hand in hand with that of spacial and temporal ideas.
Symptoms of sensible recognition (p. 237) are observable from the very first days, in the rapidly aquired ability to find the mother's breast and in the obvious habituation to the objects and persons of the environment.
Still, for a long time these associations cover only very short intervals of time, at first only hours, then days. Even in [p. 287] the third and fourth years children either forget entirely or remember only imperfectly persons who bay been absent for a few weeks.
The case with attention is similar. At first it is possible to concentrate it upon a single object only for a very short time, and it is obvious that passive apperception which always follows the predominating stimulus, that is the one whose affective tone is strongest (p. 217), is the only form present. In the first weeks, however, a lasting attention begins to show itself in the way the child fixates and follows objects for a longer time, especially if they are moving; and at the same time we have the first trace of active apperception in the ability to turn voluntarily from one impression to another. From this point on, the ability becomes more and more fully developed; still, the attention, even in later childhood, fatigues more rapidly than in the case of adults, and requires a greater variety of objects or a more frequent pause for rest.
6. The development of self-consciousness keeps pace with that of the associations and apperceptions. In judging of this development we must guard against accepting as signs of self-consciousness any single symptoms, such as the child's discrimination of the parts of his body from objects of his environment, his use of the word "I", or even the recognition of his own image in the mirror. The ***** savage who has never seen his own reflected image before, takes it for some other person. The use of the personal pronoun is due to the child's imitation of the examples of those about him. This imitation comes at very different times in the cases of different children, even when their intellectual development in other respects is the same. It is, to be sure, a symptom of the presence of self-consciousness, but the first beginnings of self-consciousness may have preceded this discrimination [p. 288] in speech by a longer or shorter period of time as the case may be. Again, the discrimination of the body from other objects is a symptom of exactly the same kind. The re cognition of the body is a process that regularly precedes that of the recognition of the image in the mirror, but one is as little a criterion of the beginning of self-consciousness as the other. They both presuppose the existence of some degree of self-consciousness beforehand. Just as the developed self-consciousness is based upon a number of different conditions (p. 221), so in the same way the self-consciousness of the child is from the first a product of several components, partly ideational in character, partly affective and volitional. Under the first head we have the discrimination of a constant group of ideas, under the second the development of certain interconnected processes of attention and volitional acts. The constant group of ideas does not necessarily include all parts of the body, as, for example, the legs, which are usually covered, and it may, as is more often the case, include external objects, as, for example, the clothes generally worn. The subjective affective and volitional components, and the relations that exist between these and the ideational components in external volitional acts, are the factors that exercise the decisive influence. Their greater influence is shown especially by the fact that strong feelings, especially those of pain, very often mark in an individual's memory the first moment to which the continuity of his self-consciousness reaches back. But there can be no doubt that a form of self-consciousness, even though less interconnected, exists even before this first clearly remembered moment, which generally comes in the fifth or sixth year. Still, since the objective observation of the child is not supplied at first with any certain criteria, it is impossible to determine the exact moment when self-consciousness begins. Probably the traces of it [p. 289] begin to appear in the first weeks; after this it continually becomes clearer under the constant influence of the conditions mentioned, and increases in temporal extent just as consciousness in general does.
7. The development of will is intimately connected with that of self-consciousness. It may be inferred partly from the development of attention described above, partly from the rise and gradual perfection of external volitional acts, whose influence on self-consciousness has just been mentioned. The immediate relation of attention to will appears in the fact that symptoms of active attention and voluntary action come at exactly the same time. Very many animals execute immediately after birth fairly perfect impulsive movements, that is, ****** volitional acts. These are rendered possible by inherited reflex-mechanisms of a complex character.
